The Students’ Society at McGill University in Montreal recently voted to adopt a “Palestine Solidarity Policy,” proposed by the student club Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. At the Tufts University campus in Massachusetts, meanwhile, Students for Justice in Palestine launched a “Justice Through BDS” campaign, publishing a manifesto in the campus newspaper. Richard Cravatts details of these and other actions by student groups, as well as their pernicious effects on university culture.

At McGill University, anti-Israel sentiment is already so endemic that the university’s student newspaper, the McGill Daily, refuses to run any content that is pro-Israel or defends Zionism or the Jewish state. And a 2021 editorial, seeming to speak on behalf of the whole student body, denounced Israel’s purported “colonialism, imperialism, and genocide in all forms”; condemned “McGill’s Zionist involvement, which is reflected in their continued investment in Israeli and international businesses located on occupied Palestinian land”; and claimed that the “Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is nothing short of apartheid.”

A small core of radical students, obsessively agitating against Israel, Zionism, and the many alleged predations of the Jewish state, have infected not only McGill’s press but also, apparently, its student government, pushing through the latest in a string of anti-Israel resolutions meant to slander, defame, and delegitimize Israel and its supporters on campus. It also calls for the McGill community actively and resolutely to participate in boycotts against and divestment from campus-related businesses allegedly involved in any way with Israel.

On the Tufts University campus in Massachusetts, students have been consistently harangued by anti-Israel activism similar to that on display at McGill, orchestrated by Tuft’s chapter of the Students for Justice in Palestine. In March, for example, the group announced its own version of a proposed boycott of Israel-linked businesses, organizations, and sponsors. The group called “on students to show their support for Palestinian liberation through personal choices—namely, refusing to buy products or participate in groups that enable and normalize Zionist settler colonialism.”

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.