From changing the former church of Hagia Sofia from a museum into a mosque, to sending troops to Syria, Libya, Qatar, Somalia, and Djibouti, to provoking America by buying advanced surface-to-air missiles from Russia, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has made clear his ambitions to turn his country into a leading regional power with influence well beyond the Middle East. Not just that, write Yossi Kuperwasser and Lenny Ben-David, but he has also acted like a “bully,” using various strategic advantages to get his way. They evaluate his activities and ambitions, and how they affect Israel:

Turkey . . . displays considerable hyperactivity in Palestinian and Israeli issues. Turkey stands in solidarity with Hamas, Turkey’s partner and protégé in the Muslim Brotherhood camp. Erdogan met on August 23, 2020, with Hamas’s leadership and granted Turkish citizenship and passports to a dozen Hamas activists, including convicted terrorists, . . . even though [Turkey] maintains diplomatic relations and a very extensive financial relationship with Israel, all the while trying to present itself as the Palestinians’ greatest supporter.

Turkish provocations against Israel are unrestrained and are [also] reflected in the Turkish opposition to Israel’s normalization of ties with the Arab world, its attempts to thwart the plan to lay a gas pipeline from Israel to Europe.

At the same time, Erdogan recognizes Israel’s military and political power (especially its relations with the United States, Europe, and Russia) and realizes that without relations with Israel, its ability to intervene in the Palestinian system would diminish. Turkey also recognizes the importance of diplomatic and economic ties with Israel. That is why Erdogan avoided irreversible moves that would damage his country’s diplomatic relations.

To prevent Erdogan from provocations against Israel, it must be made clear to him the limits to the actions that Israel is willing to tolerate. Legitimate criticism and political disagreements are certainly within the allowable limit, while harming Israel’s vital interests and aiding terrorist organizations may lead to a determined Israeli response.

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.