When FIFA—the international governing body for soccer—held its annual congress in Bahrain last week, the Palestinian Authority hoped it would discuss whether six West Bank-based Israeli teams are in violation of the organization’s rules for playing on “Palestinian” territory without permission from the Palestinian Football League (PFA). The item was removed from the congress’s agenda at the last minute, but Simon Smith argues that the issue is bound to resurface, and more than sports is at stake:

The . . . PFA will no doubt push FIFA to make a decision [about the status of the West Bank leagues] in the future. The problem for FIFA is that whatever it decides will have huge ramifications. . . . A ruling in favor of the PFA would represent a significant international body defining the territory of a Palestinian state, which no doubt is the intention of the PFA’s four-year-long campaign to have this item on the agenda. [Yet] a ruling in Israel’s favor would be interpreted by many as an acknowledgment that the six settlements [where these clubs are located] are part of sovereign Israeli territory. FIFA would like to do neither, and yet if the item is ever brought to a vote, [delegates] are caught in a zero-sum game where they have to make a choice.

Should FIFA rule against Israel, the likely reprimand will be a six-month window to remove the clubs from the Israeli league system or face suspension from FIFA and the removal of Israel’s national soccer team from competitive matches such as World Cup Qualifying.

However, compliance would be perhaps more significant still. If the PFA can remove the settlement’s soccer clubs through FIFA, it might give more impetus to the greater Palestinian aspiration of removing the settlements themselves through the UN. We are potentially seeing a microcosm of the Palestinian strategy to internationalize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and once again shirk bilateral negotiations, through the prism of soccer.

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.