Last week, Jordan’s King Abdullah II gave his annual speech marking the anniversary of his country’s independence. Pinhas Inbari explains the implications of his remarks on the Palestinians:

Abdullah stated that Palestine is part of the “Arabism” [uruba] of the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks declared on June 5, 1916, and stressed the centrality of the al-Aqsa Mosque as the primary responsibility of the Hashemites [Jordan’s ruling dynasty]. . . . [He thus] ignored Palestinian desires for a state—and Palestinian nationalism in general. . . .

The speech came after a progressive deterioration in relations between Jordan and the Palestinian Authority to the point of a break between the king and the head of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas. . . . Looming over the Jordanian-PA rift is the possible Jordanian option of closing the bridges over the Jordan River as Egypt closed its Rafah crossing with Gaza.

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.