One of the dangers of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons—cited not only by analysts, but by President Joe Biden and Senator Robert Menendez—is the prospect that other Middle Eastern countries will respond with their own race to the bomb, leaving a region filled with unstable and mercurial nuclear-armed regimes. In a recent essay in the New York Times, Peter Beinart sought to refute this line of reasoning, citing the fact that Israel has long had nuclear weapons without triggering such an arms race. Shany Mor responds:

The fact that Israel, uniquely in the world, is a state and a society that some actively wish to see eliminated—and that this elimination fantasy has been central to the worldview of various regional actors and has informed their political and ideological priorities for decades—has no place in [Beinart’s] analysis. The desire to see the Jewish presence in the Middle East wiped out, and the obsessive hatred of Jews which informs it, do not exist in Beinart’s analysis.

[Indeed], American policy makers treat the deterrent needs of Israel and Iran differently—[because] one of those is a tiny country whose elimination is a fantasy ideologically and theologically central to millions.

[And] it’s not just American presidents who understand that, but leaders of most of the global powers that have much less friendly relations with Israel, but have taken a similar approach to this issue. In fact, it is even tacitly understood by many of Israel’s neighbors. The whole point of the remarks by Menendez and Biden . . . is that an Iranian nuclear capability would engender a regional arms race, while whatever presumptions there have been about the status quo in the region have not.

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.