As Mahmoud Abbas continues to reject Benjamin Netanyahu’s calls for a renewal of negotiations, and Israel’s relations with Sunni Arab states continue to improve, the idea of a regional peace conference has started to gain traction in some Israeli government circles. Eylon Aslan-Levy, citing past precedent, argues that such a conference is unlikely to succeed:

The last Arab-Israeli regional peace conference was a failure and a farce. In 1949, the United Nations convened a regional summit in Lausanne, Switzerland, to follow up on the armistice agreements at the end of Israel’s War of Independence. . . . [Representatives of] Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and Lebanon . . . sat in one room and the Israelis in another for indirect talks: the Arab bloc refused to negotiate face-to-face. Since none of the Arab states wished to be seen as the side willing to make concessions, their diplomats ended up collectively reinforcing each other’s intransigence, raising the conditions for a deal impossibly high and obviating [the possibility of an] agreement. . . .

[A] regional peace conference establishes one side as a diplomatic cartel, so to speak. By foreclosing the option of separate agreements, where Israel could bargain for favorable terms, the Arab states can club together to raise the price of peace. . . . This cartel, however, is really a consortium of states. Negotiations, therefore, would have two stages: among the Arabs, to agree on a common position, and then with Israel. . . . [As at Lausanne, no one state] would want to be “outed” as the side that made the collective Arab bloc “blink first” on an ostensibly non-negotiable deal, thereby weakening its [own] hand. As such, the Arab states are liable [once more to] make the price [of peace] impossibly high.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.