In his final hours in office, John Kerry formally notified Congress that the State Department was releasing $221 million in aid to Mahmoud Abbas’s government, despite the hold that the House of Representatives had twice put on the funds. Elliot Kaufman comments:

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry surprised many observers by devoting so much of their waning time in office to excoriating Israel. But it turns out they had more mischief planned: a last-minute Palestinian bailout. . . . The Obama administration informed Congress that the money would fund humanitarian projects as well as political and security reforms to help prepare for a future Palestinian state. However, only the willfully blind can deny that this money will also finance terrorism and ultimately prolong the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Since 2004, Palestinian law has explicitly mandated large monthly payments to the families of terrorists who attack Israel, as well as salaries and jobs for the terrorists on their release from Israeli jails. The PA structures the payments so as to make its incentives crystal-clear: the more Israelis you wound or kill, the more money your family will receive. Some families of terrorists can even receive up to $3,100 per month—so long as their relative has killed many Israelis and either died during the attack or was sentenced to over 30 years in Israeli jail. By comparison, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics reports that the average Palestinian salary is just over $276 per month.

These payments add up. In 2014, Israel estimated that the PA paid $75 million per year to families of terrorists. However, the number may have risen sharply this past year, to $137.8 million, financing the “knife intifada” that terrorized Israelis. By transferring $221 million in its final hours, the Obama administration has tried to ensure that the PA will be able to carry on business as usual without reducing its terror subsidies.

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.