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.

While conventional wisdom in the Western press believes that the war with Hamas has left Jerusalem more isolated and scuttled chances of expanding the Abraham Accords, Gabriel Scheinmann points to a very different reality. He begins with Iran’s massive drone and missile attack on Israel last month, and the coalition that helped defend against it:

America’s Arab allies had, in various ways, provided intelligence and allowed U.S. and Israeli planes to operate in their airspace. Jordan, which has been vociferously attacking Israel’s conduct in Gaza for months, even publicly acknowledged that it shot down incoming Iranian projectiles. When the chips were down, the Arab coalition held and made clear where they stood in the broader Iranian war on Israel.

The successful batting away of the Iranian air assault also engendered awe in Israel’s air-defense capabilities, which have performed marvelously throughout the war. . . . Israel’s response to the Iranian night of missiles should give further courage to Saudi Arabia to codify its alignment. Israel . . . telegraphed clearly to Tehran that it could hit precise targets without its aircraft being endangered and that the threshold of a direct Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear or other sites had been breached.

The entire episode demonstrated that Israel can both hit Iranian sites and defend against an Iranian response. At a time when the United States is focused on de-escalation and restraint, Riyadh could see quite clearly that only Israel has both the capability and the will to deal with the Iranian threat.

It is impossible to know whether the renewed U.S.-Saudi-Israel negotiations will lead to a normalization deal in the immediate months ahead. . . . Regardless of the status of this deal, [however], or how difficult the war in Gaza may appear, America’s Arab allies have now become Israel’s.