The Associated Press recently ran a story under the headline “Palestinians Left Waiting as Israel Is Set to Deploy Vaccine,” which neatly encapsulates the ways in which the media distort their reporting on the Jewish state. Although nothing in the headline is, strictly speaking, false, it betrays the authors’ habit of seeing all stories about the area as evidence of Jews persecuting Arabs. Tamar Sternthal explains:

According to the Oslo Accords, Palestinian authorities—not Israel—are responsible for the healthcare, including vaccines, of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a key fact completely concealed by the [AP’s] grossly misleading claim that “millions of Palestinians” are “living under Israeli control.” Palestinians in the Gaza Strip live under the Palestinian government ruled by Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. The vast majority of West Bank Palestinians live under the civilian and security control of the Palestinian Authority. (Despite the fact that Israel is not obligated to provide Palestinians with vaccines, Israeli officials have indicated that they will consider transferring any surplus doses to the Palestinians, a fact which AP did report.)

In the West Bank, it is the Palestinian Authority that decides whether it prioritizes investment in medical care or grants for imprisoned terrorists and the families of deceased terrorists. It is Hamas in the Gaza Strip which decides whether it invests in rockets and tunnels or hospitals and vaccines.

Besides the Palestinian Authority’s and Hamas’s decisions to invest in terrorism at the expense of healthcare, other Palestinian-generated factors have been detrimental to procuring the vaccine [that have likewise been ignored by the international media]. Earlier this month, the Times of Israel reported that efforts to coordinate Israeli-Palestinian cooperation on procuring vaccines for Palestinians was stymied by the Palestinian decision to cut off all coordination with the Israelis.

In the latest iteration of the phenomenon described by [the journalist and Mosaic contributor Matti] Friedman—“a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills”—Israel is to be blamed for the Palestinians’ delay in obtaining the vaccine, a shortage afflicting poor countries around the world, including those that don’t pour hundreds of millions of dollars into terrorism every year.

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.