In Israel’s latest major political dust-up, the Knesset last week failed to renew a law that withholds automatic residency rights and citizenship from Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens. The law was first passed in 2003 and has been renewed annually since. Nadav Shragai explains the circumstances that gave rise to it in the first place:

On March 31, 2002, days after the suicide bombing at the Park Hotel in Netanya, there was another suicide bombing, this one at the Matza restaurant in Haifa. Sixteen Israelis, including three fathers with their children, were killed. The bomber, Shadi Tubasi, was an Israeli citizen who lived in [the West Bank town of] Jenin. His mother, Naja, originally from the village of Muqabla in [northern Israel], had married a man from Jenin 30 years earlier, and even though she never returned to her home village, she retained Israeli citizenship.

Thanks to the “family-reunification” policy [suspended by the 2003 law], through Naja, her husband and children—including her suicide bomber son—all obtained Israeli citizenship. Shadi exploited his, and the freedom of movement it gave him, to travel to Haifa where he carried out his horrific attack. About a third of the households in his village Muqabla were mixed Palestinian and Arab Israeli couples.

Back then, before Israel’s citizenship and entry laws were amended by a temporary order that revoked citizenship or residency from Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip who had married Arab Israelis, dozens of Palestinian terrorists used their Israeli citizenship to perpetrate terrorist attacks in Israel. According to figures from the security establishment for 2001-2016, children of family reunification represent about 5 percent of the country’s Arab [citizens], but 15 percent of Arab Israeli terrorists.

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.