According to recent polls (taken, one should note, before the fighting with Gaza resumed on Tuesday), the Likud would lose eight Knesset seats if an election were held tomorrow, while the other parties in Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition would lose another three or four. Conventional wisdom reasonably assumes that the stalled attempt at judicial reform, and the social unrest it brought about, are responsible for this shift. Yet, argues Michel Gurfinkiel, it is not Yair Lapid—who emerged as the leader of the anti-judicial-reform protests—and his secularist, center-left Yesh Atid party, who stand to gain from the prime minister’s loss:

The true winner is the right-of-center National Unity party, led by a former [IDF] chief-of-staff and defense minister, Benny Gantz, which rose to a projected 29 seats from twelve seats last November. That turns it into the opposition’s main group, well ahead of Yesh Atid.

For those in Likud who were losing faith in Mr. Netanyahu’s political wizardry, and those who, whatever their background, were concerned by a potential disruption of the economy or the army [during the protests], the former chief-of-staff looked like the only alternative, especially against Mr. Lapid.

Most of the conservative voters who helped Mr. Gantz to emerge over the past weeks would probably desert him if he again enters in a coalition with Mr. Lapid and the far left, as he did in the past. Conversely, his core supporters, who granted him twelve seats in 2022, are weary of an alliance with Mr. Netanyahu. The way out might be, ideally, a national-emergency government led on equal footing by both Likud and National Unity.

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.