In a roundtable discussion, Hillel Frisch, Eytan Gilboa, Gershon Hacohen, Efraim Inbar, Eran Lerman, Max Singer, and Joshua Teitelbaum discuss the importance of keeping Israel’s capital unified, how that unity can be ensured, and how it can be securely maintained. According to Lerman:

The carving-up of Jerusalem . . . is impossible to implement, no matter how ardently some may wish for it to be done. It would constitute a disastrous retreat from basic Zionist verities and Jewish imperatives. It would tear apart Israeli society. It would reverse the remarkable achievements of nearly 50 years of Israel’s custodianship of the unified city—a custodianship not free of failures and blemishes and yet impressive in its outcome.

Jerusalem today is a city of nearly a million residents, a joy to behold, alive with active social and cultural life. [Dividing] it would ultimately do nothing but harm to the lives of most of the Arab Jerusalemites—who already know how much better they are doing in comparison with their brothers across the PA line. . . .

Therefore, Israeli policy must be directed quietly and confidently at perpetuating Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, even if a proper [designation] of where the city [limits] end, and some unnecessary accretions begin, may be open to discussion.

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.