In 2018, Palestinians in Gaza began organizing mass demonstrations along the barrier with Israel, with Hamas operatives joining in by attacking Israeli soldiers and trying to breach the barrier. These protests petered out in the following year, achieving little besides a fawning report from Amnesty International, the deaths of over 100 Palestinians, and Jerusalem’s decision to expand the fishing zone on the Gaza coast. A few days ago, Hamas began organizing these demonstrations anew. Khaled Abu Toameh explains why:

The latest attacks on Israelis by Hamas, however, appear to be less linked to Israel, which has taken a series of measures over the past two years to boost the economy and improve the living conditions of the Palestinians in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. Those measures include issuing work permits in Israel for more than 17,000 Palestinians.

Hamas is now sending Palestinians to get killed or injured on the border with Israel because it is apparently upset with its friends in Qatar, the Gulf state that has long been supporting the Muslim Brotherhood organization, of which Hamas is an offshoot. Hamas is evidently taken aback because Qatar has reduced the monthly financial grant it has been providing to the Islamist movement in the Gaza Strip over the past five years.

The controversy surrounding the financial grant is yet another example of how Palestinian leaders (in this instance Hamas) regularly sacrifice their young people for the sake of money. The leaders of Hamas, most of whom lead comfortable lives in Qatar, Turkey, and Lebanon, appear to care little about Palestinians getting killed or injured while attacking Israeli troops. What they do appear to care about is how to enrich themselves and their families and continue the jihad (holy war) to destroy Israel. They also appear not to care if thousands of Palestinian workers are unable to enter Israel every day for work because of the violence along the border.

Commenting on the hearings of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Tuesday about anti-Semitism on college campuses, and the dismaying testimony of three university presidents, Jonah Goldberg writes:

If some retrograde poltroon called for lynching black people or, heck, if they simply used the wrong adjective to describe black people, the all-seeing panopticon would spot it and deploy whatever resources were required to deal with the problem. If the spark of intolerance flickered even for a moment and offended the transgendered, the Muslim, the neurodivergent, or whomever, the fire-suppression systems would rain down the retardant foams of justice and enlightenment. But calls for liquidating the Jews? Those reside outside the sensory spectrum of the system.

It’s ironic that the term colorblind is “problematic” for these institutions such that the monitoring systems will spot any hint of it, in or out of the classroom (or admissions!). But actual intolerance for Jews is lathered with a kind of stealth paint that renders the same systems Jew-blind.

I can understand the predicament. The receptors on the Islamophobia sensors have been set to 11 for so long, a constituency has built up around it. This constituency—which is multi-ethnic, non-denominational, and well entrenched among students, administrators, and faculty alike—sees Israel and the non-Israeli Jews who tolerate its existence as an affront to their worldview and Muslim “identity.” . . . Blaming the Jews for all manner of evils, including the shortcomings of the people who scapegoat Jews, is protected because, at minimum, it’s a “personal truth,” and for some just the plain truth. But taking offense at such things is evidence of a mulish inability to understand the “context.”

Shocking as all that is, Goldberg goes on to argue, the anti-Semitism is merely a “symptom” of the insidious ideology that has taken over much of the universities as well as an important segment of the hard left. And Jews make the easiest targets.