Last week, the U.S. abstained from a vote at the UN in support of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA), an institution whose primary purpose is to keep Palestinians in a permanent state of dependency, and is deeply entangled with terrorist groups. The resolution also endorsed a Palestinian “right of return,” that is, a right to settle in the Jewish state no matter how its borders are defined. Jonathan Tobin comments:

Compared to the existential threat posed by Iran’s nuclear ambitions and the American desire for a rapprochement with Tehran, talk about a “right of return” that will never happen outside of the ideological fantasy world of the United Nations doesn’t seem too important. And other than some protests about the U.S. abstention from critics of Biden’s policies like the Zionist Organization of America, most of the world seemed to concur with that judgment by largely ignoring it.

But that is a mistake, both on the part of Israel and by many of those Jewish groups who are tasked with advocating for Israel. As with past failures to take on incitement against Israel at the UN Human Rights Council where anti-Semitic initiatives are just business as usual, the problem with ignoring UNRWA is that it’s not just a matter of empty talk from extremists who want to destroy the Jewish state. Letting the “apartheid Israel” lies promoted at UN forums since the infamous 2001 Durban “anti-racism” conference go unanswered has led to those canards being accepted throughout the world in academic circles and political forums, proving that ignoring UNRWA comes with a cost.

Funding for UNRWA, therefore, is not so much help for stateless people as it is ensuring that they remain without permanent homes so that the war on Israel can go on. UNRWA facilities and schools are incubators not just for Palestinian irredentism but also of hate for Jews and Israelis, not to mention material assistance for terrorists like those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

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.