The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has created an energy crisis in Europe, which can no longer rely on gas imported from Russia. Israel, which has spent two decades cultivating an offshore natural-gas industry, has an opportunity to meet this vital need. Zev Chafets reports:

Six months ago, at the climate summit in Glasgow, Israel’s newly elected prime minister Naftali Bennett pledged to cut carbon emissions to zero by 2050. Israel’s small but vociferous community of environmental activists were jubilant over the reversal of the aggressive natural-gas drilling of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu.

In a show of seriousness, Israel’s Energy Ministry announced a one-year freeze on gas exploration and on further export permits. From now on, thought the green lobby, renewables would be the future of Israeli energy. . . . That excitement came to a screeching halt last week, when the Bennett government announced a 180-degree shift in its natural-gas policy. The reason was obvious. As the director-general of the ministry, Lior Schillat, unapologetically put it, “The energy crisis in Europe has shuffled the deck. We are not sticking to dogma.”

The war in Ukraine has made it clear that it’s dangerous for a country to count on the goodwill of foreign suppliers for its energy needs. This is especially true for a country like Israel, a small nation in a hostile region. In the past twenty years, Israel has gone from being a net importer of fossil fuels to being self-sufficient, thanks to offshore gas drilling. The government is wise to preserve that independence and to take advantage of the demand from European nations looking for a substitute for Russian imports.

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.