“Many will tell you Israel has a right to defend itself, to safety and security, but are silent on whether Palestinians have those rights too,” announced Congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Twitter, as Hamas—unprovoked—rained over 1,000 rockets on civilians in the Jewish state, some of which landed in Gaza and killed Palestinians. These sentiments were echoed by other far-left members of Congress such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders. Noah Rothman comments:

If Ocasio-Cortez and Omar were truly speaking on behalf of Arab interests, you might expect to hear some of those Arab interests echo their sentiments. But the region’s Arab states have long since moved on. The Abraham Accords definitively decoupled the Sunni Arab states’ geopolitics from Palestinian affairs; they have moved with stunning alacrity to normalize relations with Jerusalem without a resolution to the Palestinian conflict. The usual dogs that are not barking in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Rabat, Khartoum, and Amman should communicate to these progressives that they’re speaking only for themselves.

[Meanwhile], the New York Times reported, the bloodletting has “nevertheless bolstered” both Hamas and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After all, “the distraction of the war, and the divisions it creates between the disparate opposition parties currently negotiating a coalition to topple him from power, have given him half a chance of remaining in office, just days after it seemed like he might finally be on the way out.” The insinuation that, if he did not engineer the conflict, Netanyahu surely welcomes it, is a repulsive sop to the paper’s parochial progressive readership.

The world has passed these progressives by. The Arab world is not erupting over the hostile actions engineered by Hamas and its Iranian backers, whom they regard as the real threat to their security.

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.