“Biden’s Win Means a Demotion for Netanyahu and Less Focus on Israel,” declared the headline of a recent report in the New York Times. Therein its author, Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger, opines that “the new administration is expected to exert a calming influence” on the Middle East. Isaac Schorr comments:

In [Halbfinger’s] view, the agreements that the Trump administration has brokered between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kosovo, and Sudan are not signs of a more stable region. But he does believe that a Biden administration would somehow have a pacifying effect. Especially if it responded to other Arab states’ expressing an interest in formalizing relations with the world’s only Jewish state by urging them to ask for more concessions from Israel in the Palestinian conflict. His idea of a balanced approach, then, entails the United States urging one of two willing parties in question not to agree to a deal unless one of the two provides more benefits to an unwilling fourth party. Got that?

[Halbfinger moreover] asserts that “Mr. Netanyahu’s stature on the global stage” has been “diminished.” He also approvingly quotes the critical Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer, who holds that “he’s gone from Trump’s wingman to the guy who polishes the canopy of the F-16.” He offers no evidence for these claims. Instead, as proof that Netanyahu is “unusually flummoxed” by Biden’s victory, he cites the fact that it took Netanyahu twelve hours after CNN and Fox News projected that Biden would become the 46th president of the United States to offer his congratulations on Twitter and that when he did, he did not by name reference the office of the presidency. Perhaps Halbfinger’s conception of being “flummoxed” differs from that of the rest of us.

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.