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.

The same is true for anti-Semitic views. The ADL’s latest global survey, released in January, found that 46 percent of adults worldwide “harbor deeply entrenched anti-Semitic attitudes, more than double compared to ADL’s first worldwide survey a decade ago and the highest level on record since ADL started tracking these trends globally.”

Nor is this trend unique to the current war. The same thing occurred during the 2014 war with Hamas. During the first month of that 50-day conflict, anti-Semitic incidents rose by 130 percent in America, 436 percent in Europe, 600 percent in South Africa, and 1,200 percent in South America compared to the same month of 2013, according to the World Zionist Organization.

Many will claim this is due to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence on the peace process, and that the world would be more sympathetic to Israel—and Jews—if Israel only had a leader who pursued peace. But that is amply refuted by the 2009 war in Gaza, when Ehud Olmert was prime minister.

Olmert was beloved by the peace processors. He won an election in March 2006 on a platform of unilateral withdrawal from most of the West Bank. When Israelis turned sharply against that idea four months later due to two cross-border kidnappings from territories Israel had previously evacuated—Lebanon and Gaza—and the ensuing Second Lebanon War, he promptly pivoted to negotiating with the Palestinian Authority chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, and in September 2008 he put forth the most generous peace proposal any Israeli leader has ever offered. It would have given the Palestinians all of Gaza, 94 percent of the West Bank, 1:1 land swaps to make up for the remaining 6 percent, Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem, and pan-Arab control of the Temple Mount. Abbas didn’t even bother responding.

Yet when the Gaza war broke out on December 27, 2008 due to incessant rocket fire on Israel from evacuated Gaza, Olmert’s peacemaking efforts proved to be worth absolutely nothing either to Israel or the Jews. As DeMogge notes, the war prompted a fierce anti-Israel backlash. Among other things, for the first time, the UN set up a special inquiry commission, which resulted in the infamous Goldstone Report accusing Israel of committing war crimes and recommending prosecution at the International Criminal Court. The fact that Richard Goldstone later recanted his own conclusions did little to mitigate the damage.

Moreover, according to the Global Forum Against Anti-Semitism, the number of anti-Semitic incidents worldwide increased more than 300 percent during the three-week war compared to the same period the previous year. This was corroborated by reports from individual countries.

The UK’s Community Security Trust (CST), for instance, recorded a new record high for anti-Semitic incidents in 2009, up 55 percent from the previous high recorded in 2006—which itself was sparked by the Second Lebanon War. According to the organization, “The main reason for this record high is the unprecedented number of anti-Semitic incidents recorded in January and February 2009, during and after the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.” Similarly, the ADL said the upsurge in anti-Semitism during that war was “the worst we’ve ever seen.”

What’s more, every upsurge in anti-Semitism normalizes the phenomenon, with the result that the next upsurge is even worse. In 2009, for instance, the CST recorded 924 incidents. In 2014, a new record high was posted, with 1,168 incidents. By 2023, the number had skyrocketed to 4,103. As the organization said in its report for 2024, after every war, “incidents quickly surge to a record spike before plateauing at a higher rate than was typical prior to the trigger event.”

Why this happens is directly related to another of the four factors I listed in my 2010 article: the empowerment of anti-Israel activists. Most people upset over photos of dead Palestinian children won’t respond by, say, trying to get their company, organization, or university to boycott Israel. If they take action at all, they’re at most likely to advocate for a cease-fire. And despite this month’s shocking American Jewish Committee poll showing that 23 percent of Americans deem it “completely” or “somewhat” acceptable to boycott Jewish artists, writers, and speakers to protest Israel, most people still wouldn’t respond by vandalizing a synagogue, trying to bar Hillel from campus, besieging Jewish students in a university library, or engaging in other acts of intimidation.

But radical anti-Israel activists will. That is why far deadlier wars in other countries around the world haven’t produced similar responses. For instance, there was no wave of academic boycotts of Syria, nor did Arab students find themselves under siege on college campuses, even though the death toll from Syria’s civil war was more than ten times the current toll in Gaza and pictures of Syrian children murdered by the Assad regime flooded the media for years. But there were no radical anti-Syria activists to push such measures.

For the radical activists, any hint of an Israeli “defeat” is empowering. That’s precisely why anti-Israel mobs erupted in gleeful celebrations on October 7, 2023, before Israel had even begun fighting in Gaza. To quote one Cornell professor who spoke at a rally a week later, they found the news that Hamas had murdered roughly 1,200 Israeli men, women, and children and abducted another 250 “exhilarating” and “energizing.”

But these activists also find generous peace proposals and territorial withdrawals empowering, since they invariably see them not as evidence of Israel’s desire for peace, but as capitulations forced by either diplomatic or military pressure (that is, terrorism). Consequently, it’s no accident that one of the first significant spikes in the activity of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction movement (BDS) occurred precisely under Olmert. One of the movement’s earliest successes was an academic boycott of Israel approved by the British faculty union NATFHE (though it was later killed by NATFHE’s merger with another union). It passed in May 2006, just when Israel’s “pro-peace” credentials should have been at their height—nine months after the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, two months after Olmert won election on a plan to withdraw unilaterally from the West Bank, and two months before the Second Lebanon War began.

It takes only a very small number of empowered radicals to push anti-Israel resolutions through institutions. The 2006 NATFHE resolution is a case in point. As the New York Times reported, only 198 of the union’s 67,000 members voted on the motion, of whom just 106 voted in favor. In other words, it only took 106 people out of 67,000 to pass an anti-Israel boycott. Most of the rest understandably didn’t consider the issue important enough to bother voting. Even in radical faculty associations like the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), where anti-Israel boycotts draw much more support, they remain minority propositions. When MESA adopted a BDS resolution in 2022, for instance, 82 percent of those voting supported it—but only a third of its roughly 2,800 members bothered to vote.

And wars obviously make it even easier to get this silent majority to remain silent. When television screens are flooded with pictures of dead Palestinians, many otherwise decent people will be uncomfortable opposing anti-Israel measures and thereby subjecting themselves to accusations of supporting “genocide.”

Similarly, only a very small number of radicals, abetted by pusillanimous administrators who refuse to interfere, are needed to terrorize Jewish college students by besieging a library (Cooper Union), barring their access to areas of campus (UCLA), impeaching Jewish members of student governments (McGill, USC), etc. And here too, the silent majority that certainly disapproves of these actions is even more likely to remain silent when they fear being accused of supporting the slaughter of Palestinian children.

Moreover, the impact doesn’t end once the war does, for either Israel or overseas Jews. If numerous institutions are passing resolutions to boycott Israel but no other country in the world, then the ordinary person who knows very little about the conflict will naturally conclude that Israel is uniquely evil. And if Israel is uniquely evil, so too are “Zionists,” i.e., the vast majority of Jews, since no matter how many reservations they voice about Israeli policy, they still think this uniquely evil entity should exist.

Thus for anti-Israel radicals, Israeli withdrawals are a triple win. The initial territorial withdrawal empowers them because they interpret it as Israel being forced into retreat. The subsequent terror attacks on Israel from the “liberated” territory empower them because Israel is once again suffering “defeat.” (That these attacks might ultimately produce far greater Palestinian suffering interests them not at all; what matters is that Israel suffer). And Israel’s response empowers them because pictures of dead Palestinians make it even easier to cow the silent majority into remaining silent when they push through anti-Israel boycotts or engage in anti-Semitic attacks on “Zionists.”

All this makes such withdrawals a triple loss for Israel’s overseas image. But it also makes them a triple loss for Jews outside of Israel. The only question is how much worse things have to get before that finally sinks in.