Mandel mentions Qatari funding as one possible reason for the predominance of anti-Israel sentiment on college campuses. Gary Wexler, drawing on his own experience, identifies another piece of the puzzle. In the 1990s, when the peace process spurred hopes of Jews and Palestinians beating their swords into plowshares, the Ford Foundation—one of the world’s wealthiest private charities, founded by the notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford and his son Edsel—began doling out money to various Israeli and Palestinian organizations, and hired Wexler to help these groups with marketing. He describes what he saw:

When we interviewed the Jewish organizations, the atmosphere was almost giddy with hope, possibility, and belief in Shimon Peres’s new Middle East. . . . But when we interviewed the Arab organizations, the word “peace” never passed their lips. They spoke of independence, dignity, self-rule, a state. One person even told me she would never use the word du-kiyum (co-existence). “There is no such thing as co-existence,” she stressed. “We are just the tenants living on the property that the Jews now own. That’s not a balanced co-existence.”

Wexler began asking tougher questions of his Arab interlocutors, and didn’t get answers, but was referred time and again to one Ameer Makhoul, who ran a Haifa-based civil-rights organization. Makhoul, well informed about Wexler by previous interviewees, bullied him and then told him the following:

Just like you were a Zionist campus activist, we will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists. Just like you spent your summers on the kibbutz, we will bring college students to spend their summers in refugee camps and work with our people. Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.

Funding for the project, Makhoul explained, would come from Arab countries and the EU. Makhoul then called the Ford Foundation to complain, mendaciously, about Wexler’s behavior. Not long thereafter, Ford ended its relationship with Wexler. Israeli officials arrested Makhoul several years later for spying for Syria. To Wexler, the enormous success of the anti-Israel movement in capturing the minds of young Americans is the fruit of Makhoul’s efforts, which indeed have been amply funded by the EU. So too the campaign in 2000 to paint the IDF as the brutal killers of a Palestinian child named Muhammad al-Dura—a story that turned out to be a hoax.

As for the Ford Foundation, it stopped all activity in Israel in 2011, but continues to be a major donor to the obsessively anti-Israel Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as to the Tides Foundation, which in turn supports If Not Now and Jewish Voice Peace, both dedicated to stirring up hatred of the Jewish state. Tablet has provided a brief overview here.

When he called upon Hamas to end the war and release the hostages last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was also getting ready for a reshuffle within his regime. On Saturday, he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh deputy president of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is intimately tied to the PA itself. Al-Sheikh would therefore succeed Abbas—who is eighty-nine and reportedly in ill health—as head of the PLO if he should die or become incapacitated, and be positioned to succeed him as head of the PA as well.

Al-Sheikh spent eleven years in an Israeli prison and, writes Maurice Hirsch, was involved in planning a 2002 Jerusalem suicide bombing that killed three. Moreover, Hirsch writes, he “does not enjoy broad Palestinian popularity or support.”

Still, by appointing Al-Sheikh, Abbas has taken a step in the internal reforms he inaugurated last year in the hope that he could prove to the Biden administration and other relevant players that the PA was up to the task of governing the Gaza Strip. Neomi Neumann writes:

Abbas’s motivation for reform also appears rooted in the need to meet the expectations of Arab and European donors without compromising his authority. On April 14, the EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas approved a three-year aid package worth 1.6 billion euros, including 620 million euros in direct budget support tied to reforms. Meanwhile, the French president Emmanuel Macron held a call with Abbas [earlier this month] and noted afterward that reforms are essential for the PA to be seen as a viable governing authority for Gaza—a telling remark given reports that Paris may soon recognize “the state of Palestine.”

In some cases, reforms appear targeted at specific regional partners. The idea of appointing a vice-president originated with Saudi Arabia.

In the near term, Abbas’s main goal appears to be preserving Arab and European support ahead of a major international conference in New York this June.