A Boston-area group advocating for boycotting, divesting from, and sanctioning Israel (BDS) has recently produced an elaborate interactive online map purporting to demonstrate the nexus between “local support for the colonization of Palestine” and “policing, evictions, and privatization locally” as well as “U.S. imperialist projects worldwide.” Among the “Zionist” institutions whose “networks” the map exposes are the Anti-Defamation League, Hillel Houses at Boston University and Brandeis, an independent Jewish high school, an organization that runs summer camps for children and young people with disabilities, and the left-wing New Israel Fund. Jonathan Tobin comments:

It’s not clear whether such extremism has much support even in the most woke sectors of one of the country’s most liberal communities. But what makes it truly sinister is the way that it creates maps of synagogues and other Jewish institutions, including schools in the state of Massachusetts, and attempts to hold them out as bastions of “harms” such as “racism,” “policing, “U.S. imperialism” and “ethnic cleansing.”

All of this amounts to a wake-up call for American Jews, both those that are affiliated with the organized community and those who never visit any of the sites that the “Mapping Project” seeks to target as bastions of everything they think the woke should protest. BDS seeks the destruction of the one Jewish state on the planet and is, by definition, anti-Semitic. But its intersectional ideas lead this movement inevitably to a position that treats Jews as hateful oppressors and legitimate objects of protest—something that always leads to violence. BDS isn’t about human rights, helping the Palestinians, peace, or justice. At its core and in action, it is a hate group, and it and all who support it should be treated accordingly.

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.