Last month, an article appeared in the magazine Foreign Policy under the headline “Israel Can’t Hide Evidence of Its Occupation Anymore,” celebrating a minor change in U.S. regulations concerning the availability of high-resolution satellite images as a victory over “censorship.” But the entire premise of the article is rooted in what might charitably be called a misunderstanding of the issue at hand. Gerald Steinberg, whose research contributed to the original piece of legislation, explains:

A very small country under threat of massive attack from conventional and unconventional forces (particularly Iraq and Syria, at the time), [Israel was] severely limited in deploying defensive and deterrent capabilities, making it vulnerable to a surprise first strike. With the addition of very high-resolution space images available for purchase by potential attackers, including Palestinian and other terror groups, and in real-time, the threat to Israel would have been much higher. . . . Understanding these concerns, the regulations were adopted [in 1996 to prevent highly detailed satellite imagery of Israel from being made public].

Now skip forward 24 years—to July 2020—when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration revised the limitations regarding imaging of Israel (from a minimum two meters to 40 centimeters), based on the improvements in technology, new Middle East strategic realities, and greater availability from non-U.S. suppliers.

For those whose main objective in life is to measure Israeli, Palestinian, and (unauthorized) European government construction in the West Bank, there are numerous other and less costly sources.

But the author of the Foreign Policy article is an employee of an organization “dedicated to demonizing Israel,” as Steinberg puts it—and lavishly funded by European governments, as well as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Open Society Foundation. And so she must find, or manufacture, subjects to keep up a steady output of “disinformation.”

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.