Last month, Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Liberia to meet with a number of West African heads of state; he made a similar visit to East African capitals last year. The trips are part of the prime minister’s global effort to strengthen Israel’s diplomatic standing. But Netanyahu also had a more specific goal in mind: putting pressure on South Africa—to which many of the continents’ nations look for leadership—to end its hostility toward the Jewish state. Amnon Lord explains:

The strengthening of relations with African countries is intended, among other things, to create a greenhouse effect, melting the “glacier” of South Africa’s hostility that [in turn] limits Israel’s relations with [other] African countries. . . .

South Africa’s experience under apartheid is used by the BDS movement as a political weapon. South Africa is largely the territorial base of BDS. . . . The power of [anti-Israel] movements is multiplied in South Africa, [which despite] all of its corruption and failures, has been transformed since the elimination of apartheid by Nelson Mandela’s leadership into a “moral power.” This [authority] could be a strategic resource for Israel—but South Africa’s status as a moral power is instead directed against Israel. . . .

Official solidarity with the Palestinian cause is absolute. It is a South African legacy of the longstanding partnership with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) that was created by the Soviet Union during the cold war. The [governing] African National Congress (ANC), [which led the anti-apartheid movement under Nelson Mandela] had many Communist members, many of them Jews. They formed the connecting link between the ANC and the PLO. This is why the senior Hamas official Khaled Meshal was received in South Africa as an official guest of honor, and even had a meeting with President Jacob Zuma.

The surprise is that there are black South Africans who are willing to fight for Israel’s sake. These are young people who feel cheated by the lies of the boycott movement; some of them are even former student BDS activists. They feel insulted that the term “apartheid” is used against Israel. As far as they are concerned, this is a kind of denial of the suffering they endured under the real apartheid system that existed in South Africa.

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.