For decades, a Belgian Jew named Arthur Langerman has been assembling what can best be titled “antisemitica.” Ben Cohen describes this frightening record of the casualness, and obscenity, of European hatred of Jews:

Gathered entirely between the end of the Second World War and the present day, Langerman’s collection . . . spans several centuries, from a grotesque 16th-century painting that depicts the supposed slaughter of the infant Simon of Trent for Jewish ritual purposes to a contemporary cartoon that shows a menacing spider marked with a Star of David sinking its claws into a map of the Gaza Strip.

The images—widely considered the largest collection of its kind in the world—are drawn from across six centuries, from all over Europe, the Middle East, and North America. This spread in terms of geography and time is matched by the sheer range of formats: postcards, newspaper and magazine cartoons, paintings, sculptures, and everyday objects such as coffee mugs transformed into trinkets with the addition of a Jewish caricature. Taken together, they demonstrate that anti-Semitism was not just an ideology of hatred, but a perverse type of entertainment through which the non-Jewish creators of such content—in the main, artists and caricaturists who are themselves no longer remembered—stripped Jews of their humanity and dignity.

It’s not that the anti-Semitic motifs contained within are unfamiliar, more that the cartoons, paintings, and objects that showcase them across the years do so through the most virulent and repellent representations. Jews are invariably portrayed as ugly and corpulent, as demonstrated in the World War II-era caricatures of tuxedoed Jewish capitalists surreptitiously serving Communist interests; dirty, as demonstrated by a crude drawing from Poland showing a sinister Jewish family delightedly living in a hovel as one of its children defecates into a bowl on the floor; and predatory.

With the IDF engaged in ground maneuvers in both northern and southern Gaza, and a plan about to go into effect next week that would separate more than 100,000 civilians from Hamas’s control, an end to the war may at last be in sight. Yet there seems to be no agreement within Israel, or without, about what should become of the territory. Efraim Inbar assesses the various proposals, from Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population entirely, to the Israeli far-right’s desire to settle the Strip with Jews, to the internationally supported proposal to place Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA)—and exposes the fatal flaws of each. He therefore tries to reframe the problem:

[M]any Arab states have failed to establish a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan all suffer from civil wars or armed militias that do not obey the central government.

Perhaps Israel needs to get used to the idea that in the absence of an entity willing to take Gaza under its wing, chaos will prevail there. This is less terrible than people may think. Chaos would allow Israel to establish buffer zones along the Gaza border without interference. Any entity controlling Gaza would oppose such measures and would resist necessary Israeli measures to reduce terrorism. Chaos may also encourage emigration.

Israel is doomed to live with bad neighbors for the foreseeable future. There is no way to ensure zero terrorism. Israel should avoid adopting a policy of containment and should constantly “mow the grass” to minimize the chances of a major threat emerging across the border. Periodic conflicts may be necessary. If the Jews want a state in their homeland, they need to internalize that Israel will have to live by the sword for many more years.