For nearly twenty years, Aaron David Miller was part of American efforts to broker a peace deal that would have involved Israel ceding control of the Golan Heights to Syria. He is now grateful that these efforts failed:

[H]ad we succeeded, the results might have been catastrophic for Israel and for the U.S.

What [the U.S.] failed to realize was that . . . any deal to return the Golan Heights . . . was likely to be . . . fraught precisely because Mr. Assad was so cruel in his policies and [because] his regime consisted of an Alawite minority governing a Sunni majority. Without real reform—something neither Hafez al-Assad nor his son and successor, Bashar, was ever really serious about—perhaps it would have been only a matter of time before Syria experienced real instability. . . .

[It] can be said with certainty . . . that had Israel given up the Golan, the situation today would have been much more complex. In response to the Syrian civil war and the rise of Islamic State, Israel would have faced a hot front, confronting Hizballah, Iran, and a range of Islamist jihadists. Given the Golan’s strategic importance, Israel would have had to reoccupy it and would have found itself in the middle of Syria’s civil war. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Israel’s actions would have been a unifying factor and might have actually bucked up the Assad regime as it tried to rally Syrians against the “Zionist enemy.” . . .

It’s a cautionary tale for well-intentioned U.S. and Israeli peacemakers alike.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.