According to a report on the news website Axios, Biden administration officials held a “high-level meeting” to discuss how to deal with the likely presence of certain right-wing ministers in the new Israeli government. Meanwhile, Washington has been making various efforts to improve relations with the Palestinian Authority. Bassam Tawil comments:

Two . . . Palestinian officials, Majed Faraj and Hussein al-Sheikh, still hold regular meetings with senior representatives of the Biden administration who evidently are not even remotely bothered by their past activities. Faraj, one of the ruling Fatah party’s most prominent activists, was arrested by Israel many times. Altogether, he spent at least six years in Israeli prison for his role in violent activities against Israel and membership in a terror group, especially during the first intifada, which erupted in 1987.

Sheikh, also a Fatah member, spent eleven years in Israeli prison for similar charges. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, he was wanted by Israel for his role in terrorism. In 2005, he was removed from Israel’s list of wanted terrorists, apparently as part of an Israeli-American attempt to strengthen the Palestinian Authority and prevent Hamas from taking over the West Bank. Faraj is head of Palestinian General Intelligence, while Sheikh is considered the number-two in the Palestinian leadership after Mahmoud Abbas.

Recently, Mahmoud al-Habbash, religious-affairs adviser to the Palestinian Authority president, equated the Jews who visit the Temple Mount in Jerusalem with “those whom Allah has cursed . . . and made of them apes and pigs.” Another senior Palestinian official, Mohammed al-Lahham, recently bragged that 90 percent of the terrorists who carried out attacks against Israelis in 2022 were members of Fatah, headed by the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Lahham also credited Fatah with murdering twenty Israelis, saying this is a source of honor for the faction.

One rarely hears the Biden administration or other Western countries expressing concern over human-rights violations committed by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas against their own people. Many in Washington and other capitals remain obsessed with Israel and refuse to see any wrongdoing on the Palestinian side.

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.