Under a golden sun on a recent morning earlier this week in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City, life seemed to brim with the kind of hopefulness that comes with spring. Cherry trees blossomed. Sparrows chirped in the oaks and maples. Students at Columbia University shed their winter jackets for T-shirts.

Demographic statistics tell us that this piece of landscape is one of the most progressive corners of America. So why are so many liberal-minded people accepting a new neighbor that is so intolerant?

I’m referring here of the so-called “People’s University of Palestine,” which occupies a patch of landscape no bigger than two football fields on the southwest corner of the central quadrangle at the heart of the Columbia campus.

The People’s University of Palestine — can we call it PUP? — has been described as an ad hoc tent encampment to protest Israel’s military campaign on the Gaza Strip and, more broadly, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The tented village has also been called the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. The immediate goal is to persuade Columbia to cancel its investments in Israeli companies and cut its academic ties to Tel Aviv University.

But something far worse is happening. The People’s University of Palestine has become a crucible for one of the world’s oldest forms of bigotry: antisemitism. All this, by the way, comes in the name of a convoluted vision of free speech and academic freedom.

I have seen the worst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while on assignment in the Middle East.

As the sun set one evening some years ago not far from the West Bank Palestinian city of Ramallah, I watched Israeli soldiers, equipped with American-made M16 rifles, shoot a Palestinian boy in the head. The boy’s “crime”? He threw rocks toward the soldiers. None of the rocks even came close to hitting any soldier.

On another disheartening day, in an Israeli prison, a Hamas operative looked me in the eye and coldly told me he was following Allah’s will when he built a bomb that killed dozens of innocent Jews, Christians and Muslims on a Jerusalem bus, including several Americans. He was serving more than 40 life sentences but didn’t seem to mind. Allah, he said, would approve.

The age-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, to put it mildly, an intractable mess, drenched in too much blood and warped righteousness on both sides. The destruction across Gaza by the Israeli military and the barbarism of last Oct. 7 by Hamas are just the latest chapter in pain. It will take years to sort through the cruel physical and psychological rubble.

But now that conflict has come to America. Columbia University’s campus is just the latest battlefield.

More than 100 blocks away from Morningside Heights, in Greenwich Village, New York University was home to its own Palestinian encampment until police dismantled it this week and arrested some 100 protesters. A plywood wall was erected to keep the encampment from returning. NYU is also the target of a civil rights lawsuit by Jewish students who say they were targets of antisemitism. Other universities are also being targeted by lawsuits citing........

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