Yesterday, the defense ministers of Israel, Cyprus, and Greece met in Nicosia, where they issued a statement condemning Turkish efforts to impinge on Cyprus’ coastal waters. The summit marks the solidification of a broader coalition—with these three states at its forefront—committed to restraining Ankara’s increasingly aggressive policies. As Oved Lobel explains, both Jerusalem’s warmer relations with the Gulf states, and the discovery of fossil-fuel reserves in the Mediterranean, strengthen this coalition:

The first trilateral meeting between the three countries took place in November 2017, at which stage military cooperation deepened dramatically.  Cyprus hosted a trilateral meeting with Israel and Greece earlier this year, and the three countries signed an agreement on deepening even further tripartite military cooperation a month ago. In July, the Greek parliament ratified a further defense agreement with Israel.

[In addition, there] is the East Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF), established officially in Cairo in January 2020. The culmination of major gas discoveries within the [coastal waters] of Israel, Cyprus, and Egypt over the past decade and consequent energy partnerships, the EMGF is meant to serve as a regional forum for energy discussions and policy coordination among all the regional states, except Turkey.

France has applied to join as a full member, with the US participating as a permanent observer. . . . Egypt also announced a second explicitly anti-Turkey coalition consisting of France, Greece, the UAE, Cyprus, and Egypt.

The most important element of all of these partnerships is the strong U.S. backing they have received, and the deepening U.S. political and military support for all the countries involved.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.