On Friday, a Palestinian stabbed an Israeli soldier in Hebron, one of the latest incidents in a general uptick in West Bank terrorist activity since the beginning of 2022. Danny Zaken contends that the violence is in fact a result of the crumbling of confidence in the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is rapidly losing control over the areas for which it is responsible. A key indicator of this loss of trust, Zaken writes, are recent protests by Palestinians who work within Israel’s pre-1967 borders:

They are protesting against the transfer of their salaries through the banks rather than in cash, as was the case until now. Their lack of trust in the PA causes the workers to oppose the move, which is supposed to help them. . . . Last week I spoke to Amjad, a Palestinian laborer from the Hebron area who has been working in Israel for years and I asked him about his opposition to transferring his salary through the banks. “You [Israelis] are cooperating with the corruption of the Palestinian Authority, and so are the Americans. Every dime that enters the Palestinian Authority goes to the corrupt.”

These harsh sentiments are echoed in countless conversations, and they are completely justified; investigations by international media over the years substantiate the complaints.

The primary beneficiaries of this corruption, as Amjad himself asserts, are the PA president Mahmoud Abbas and his sons. And this isn’t the only problem, according to Zaken:

Another reason for the escalation in the security situation is the approaching end of [Abbas’s] rule. Abbas is over eighty-seven, has postponed presidential elections more than once on various pretexts, and his status, as well as the status of the leadership of the PA as a whole, is being undermined. All this is being expressed in the deterioration of the rule of law.

In Hebron, clan battles involving gunfights have been going on for months with deaths on both sides, and the Palestinian police are powerless.

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.