Traveling to various countries to speak about foreign policy during the George W. Bush administration, Walter Russell Mead encountered a single, widely held idea: that Jewish influence was the best way to explain U.S. conduct abroad. Yet both polling data and Mead’s own casual observations revealed that American Jews overwhelmingly disliked President Bush, making it highly unlikely he was doing their bidding. Then, when Barack Obama became president, Mead’s foreign interlocutors expressed their disappointment that Obama had not created more “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel—and concluded that “the Jews” must be holding him back. This assertion too failed to hold up to even mild scrutiny. Mead thus set out to discover the real reasons for the enduring American alliance with the Jewish state, resulting in his recent book The Arc of a Covenant, which he discusses with Michael Doran. (Audio, 66 minutes)

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.