What is a refugee? The 1951 UN Refugee Convention says it is someone outside their country of nationality with a 'well-founded fear of being persecuted' for reasons of race, religion, nationality, social group membership, or political opinion. Yet beyond this legalistic criteria, all definitions include the sense that it is a temporary and undesirable status. The notion that refugees would wish to end their presumed displacement is taken as axiomatic. Yet this is not so for Palestinians, for whom the word "refugee" marks a critical part of their national identity.

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Just three weeks before he pulled off one of the greatest upsets in recent American political history, becoming the next mayor of New York City at age 34, Zohran Mamdani went for a jog in Prospect Park. He was participating in a 5K for Gaza, with all proceeds going to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) an organization charged with aiding Palestinian refugees.

The event received little attention in New York or elsewhere. It should have. In recent decades, UNRWA has become a de facto front for Hamas, used as a front to syphon humanitarian resources into Hamas's genocidal agenda.

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The historical events and their magnitude following Israel's ceasefire with Hamas are not a result of one single factor. Clearly, the courage and sacrifice of the Israel Defense Forces throughout the war these past two years, especially during the operation to conquer Gaza City, created immense pressure within Hamas in Gaza to agree to a halt in fighting.

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Call it Christmas in July: After more than a year of doing absolutely nothing to punish students who seized university property, disrupted classes, injured university employees, threatened Jewish classmates, and shared propaganda by terrorist organizations, Columbia University finally took some action that, if you squint just right, may look a bit like justice.

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Two weeks ago, a judge ordered the release of a 34-year-old named Mohsen Mahdawi, a graduate student detained weeks earlier by Department of Homeland Security agents in Vermont. The usual suspects, including pundits, professors, and our self-appointed intellectual and moral betters, celebrated Mahdawi's newfound freedom, arguing that detaining him—during his naturalization interview, no less—was an egregious overreach and that the Trump administration had no good case to make against Mahdawi. It was such a perfect storm of virtue signaling, complete with Mahdawi himself delivering a defiant speech from the courthouse steps, that the facts, as they usually do in such cases, were drowned out by the sound and fury.

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