Israeli Territorial Concessions Worsen Anti-Semitism in the West

I was delighted to read Rafi DeMogge’s essay arguing that territorial withdrawals harm rather than help Israel’s international image, since I have been making this argument for over fifteen years, most comprehensively in a 2010 article in Commentary titled “The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace.” That article detailed four reasons why the peace process had damaged Israel’s standing overseas, including the one DeMogge focused on—the fact that every bit of territory ceded to the Palestinians has become a base for lethal terror, necessitating military operations that inevitably produce more Palestinian casualties than policing Israeli-controlled territory ever does. And as DeMogge correctly noted, nothing hurts Israel’s image overseas more than pictures of dead Palestinians.

But while territorial withdrawals are devastating for Israel, its people aren’t the only ones who suffer. Nor are the Palestinians, though Israeli pullouts have substantially increased their casualties in every round of conflict. Withdrawals have also been devastating for Jews outside of Israel. Yet despite the massive increases in anti-Semitism these pullouts have caused, non-Israeli Jews overwhelmingly remain committed to securing more of them.

I doubt Mosaic’s readers need to be convinced of the drastic rise in anti-Semitism sparked by the current war, but the numbers speak for themselves. In America, for instance, the ADL recorded three times as many anti-Semitic incidents in the twelve-month period starting on October 7, 2023 as in the previous twelve months. In France, the number of incidents rose 384 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, with the vast majority occurring after October 7. In the United Kingdom, 2023 saw an increase of 247 percent, again mostly in the final three months of the year.