“It is undeniable,” writes Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, “that hatred of Israel foments hatred of Jews,” and that “attacks on Israel lead to attacks on Jews.” Yet, he laments, many Jews are unwilling to recognize these causal connections:

I spend so much time emphasizing the anti-Semitism of the hard left not because I believe that the anti-Semitism of the extreme right is any less pervasive or dangerous. But I am a liberal rabbi leading a Reform synagogue composed of mostly liberal Jews. And in my view, many liberal Jews are misled by the high-sounding rhetoric of anti-Zionist students, liberal professors, thought leaders, influencers, and media and social-media personalities.

For some, the term “social justice” now means that Israel is somehow to blame for racism in American police departments. Even our own Jewish concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world—has been co-opted and distorted by some Jews to virtue-signal their moral purity. Twenty-two percent of American Jews—one in five—believe that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians, according to a recent study by the Jewish Electorate Institute.

Threats to destroy the Jewish state are threats to destroy the Jewish people. When they shout, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” they mean “destroy Israel.” “Free Palestine” for them does not mean coexistence with Israel. It means Palestinian existence without Israel. Ask them. They don’t hide it. They simply rely on your ignorance and naïveté because they spout words that sound progressive to you: human rights, civil rights, indigenous rights, anti-racism, anti-apartheid, anti-colonialism. For them, it is nefarious Jewish power centrally organized by Israel and supported by world Jewry, standing in the way of peace, prosperity, liberation, and justice.

We should reflect deeply on our withdrawal from Afghanistan. The lesson of Afghanistan for the Jews—a lesson we should have learned a thousand times—is that if you want to survive, you need to rely on yourself. You cannot subcontract your defense and protection to anyone, least of all to faux human-rights activists and their deluded supporters who sit in ivory towers: intellectuals who write and think all day, who preen with academic arrogance, but are incapable of understanding what is really going on in people’s hearts. Preoccupied with their shallow self-righteousness, they ignore even basic human emotions, motivations, and drives; bleeding hearts who have no heart for bleeding Jews.

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.