Seeing a correlation between the cultural and political decline of the Islamic Middle East and its increasing levels of anti-Semitism, Frank Musmar and Najat al-Saied argue that Arab countries should seek to change attitudes toward Jews if they want to put an end to decades of stagnation:

Pan-Arabism and Islamism created an enemy to explain away [Arab states’] failures. The Jews became the scapegoat for their inability to keep pace with Western scientific and creative development. Pan-Arabists and Islamists spent decades feeding Arabs a steady diet of conspiracy theories to convince them that the Jews were to blame for all that ailed their societies.

Despite the campaign of hatred directed at it by the Arab world from its earliest days, Israel developed rapidly and has won twelve Nobel Prizes—more per capita than the U.S., France, and Germany—to the Arab world’s six since 1966. Israel is a high-tech superpower and one of the world’s largest arms exporters, with annual arms sales of approximately $6.5 billion. Despite Israel’s small size, about 4.5 percent of its GDP is spent on research and development, double the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average.

Instead of striving to close the gap between Israel’s high-tech economy and the far less developed economies of the Arab world, including in the West Bank and Gaza, Arabs have thrown their energies into the anti-Semitic boycott, divest, and sanction movement and the delegitimization of Israel. The Arab states’ campaign of anti-Semitism in the service of creating an imaginary enemy does not appear to have worked to their benefit in any way. On the contrary: it has inhibited their development and ability to innovate.

Musmar and Saied argue that educational reform and relaxation of media censorship can do much to rectify the situation.

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.