Since the February anti-Semitic riot at Berkeley, Jewish students are no longer waiting passively for administrators to protect them and dole out justice to the rioters but are taking matters into their own hands. So David Schraub, a law professor and frequent commentator on American Jewish matters who earned a PhD at Berkeley, reports.

“A few other developments have occurred since [the riot], both of which entail Jews becoming the protesters, rather than the protested,” he writes.

First, my friend and former colleague Ron Hassner has begun a sit-in in his own office, refusing to leave until the Berkeley administration takes action regarding a series of demands he’s made regarding how to address campus anti-Semitism. Second, a large group of Berkeley Jewish students marched on Sather Gate, where a different group of pro-Palestinian students had been blocking passage as part of their own protest (and reportedly have been haranguing Jewish students in the vicinity).

This marks a significant change from how Jews on campus have acted in the past:

This is an interesting example of Jews adopting what I termed a “protest politic”—seeking change via the medium of a protest (as opposed to, say, a board resolution, letter to the editor, or political hearings). . . . While I personally am averse to protests (not on general political or tactical grounds; it’s a temperamental preference), it does seem that acting via protest—sit-ins, marches, or even disruption—[is] a way of marking yourself as being of a particular political class on campus and so a way of being taken seriously.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.