Last month, Rabat and Jerusalem concluded a major security-cooperation agreement, complete with a public visit to Morocco by the Israeli defense minister. The agreement comes almost a year after the North African kingdom reestablished diplomatic ties with the Jewish state in the wake of the Abraham Accords. While Efraim Inbar sees reason to hope that relations between the two countries will only grow stronger, he also provides a warning:

Although Morocco sent forces to fight against Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and 1973 Yom Kippur War, it has in recent years emerged as a moderate Arab state when it comes to the Jewish state. . . . Morocco plays an important role globally, and in the Middle East and Africa in particular. Its royal family claim to be descendants of the prophet Mohammad, which gives it a certain influence among Arab countries. Rabat normalizing ties with Jerusalem will pave the way for other Arab countries to do the same.

But we should bear in mind that these relations are under heavy criticism by extremists in Morocco, and internal political changes may bring the honeymoon to an end.

We must not forget that instability is a hallmark in any such relationship. If Israel fails to halt Iran’s nuclear progress, the pro-Israel trends in the region will disappear. The Iranian threat is what prompted these Arab countries openly to normalize ties with Israel. The absence of Israeli action will take away from the achievement that is the Abraham Accords, including ties with Morocco.

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.