On Tuesday, a number of Christian leaders in Israel published a statement complaining about the situation of their flocks, asserting that “radical local groups with extremist ideologies” have made their lives “unbearable”—a message amplified by the archbishop of Canterbury. The truth is very different, the Times of Israel reports:

Israel’s Christian community grew by 1.4 percent in 2020 and numbers some 182,000 people, with 84 percent saying they were satisfied with life in the country, the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) said in a report released ahead of Christmas.

According to the CBS, Christians make up about 1.9 of Israel’s population. Christians make up 7 percent of Israel’s Arab population, and 76.7 percent of Christians in Israel are Arab. . . . The statistics revealed that Arab Christian women had some of the highest education rates in the country. It showed that 53.1 percent of Arab Christians and 35.4 percent of non-Arab Christians went on to get a bachelor’s degree after finishing high school, compared to 34 percent of the total number of high-school graduates in the Arab school system and 47.2 percent of all high-school graduates in Hebrew education.

The report also found lower numbers of Christians signing up for unemployment benefits compared to the Jewish and Muslim populations. The findings present a contrast to recent statements by Christian leaders.

There is an easy explanation for the discrepancy between these leaders’ public comments and the survey results: given their precarious position in Muslim-majority Arab society, Middle Eastern Christian must make an extra effort to prove their anti-Zionist bona fides. It is of course in Palestinian-controlled parts of Israel, Gaza especially, where they have faired the worst.

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.