While the Israeli right dates back to the early days of Zionism, it is only recently that some its members have begun to think of themselves as conservatives—a word that remains rare on the pens and lips of journalists and politicians. Those Israelis who are trying to create a self-consciously conservative political orientation naturally look to the American example. Responding to a recent article on the subject (in Hebrew) by the Israeli intellectual Gadi Taub, Peter Berkowitz comments on how that model relates to the conditions of the Jewish state:

To make good on their aspiration to develop a self-conscious Israeli conservatism, maintains Taub, religious Zionist intellectuals must grasp that the Mizraḥi traditionalists, [that is, Jews of Middle Eastern origin with traditional, if not strictly Orthodox, attitudes toward religion, family, and nationhood], represent the “wide and sturdy base of that which deserves to be called conservatism in Israel.” . . . In this, Taub provides further confirmation of [the English political philosopher Edmund] Burke’s pertinence to Israeli conservatism. Like his heirs in the post-World War II conservative movement in America, Burke defended the moral outlook and everyday ways of ordinary people from the pretensions of those keen to use government to dictate morals and manage citizens’ lives.

Taub does not stress it, but individual freedom—basic civil and political liberties of the sort that flow from unalienable rights—is essential in a pluralistic democracy like Israel’s as well. By limiting state power, individual rights both safeguard minorities from oppressive expressions of majority will and protect the majority from managerial elites and judges and government bureaucrats determined on their own authority to override majority preferences and moral judgments to implement their class’s preferences and moral judgments.

Individual rights and the respect for human dignity which they reflect, moreover, have strong roots in Zionism, as attested to by the abundant appeals to fundamental rights in Israel’s Declaration of Independence.

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.