One presidential administration after another has attempted to bring about a negotiated settlement to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but none has succeeded. To the contrary, argues Michael Mandelbaum—all the U.S. has accomplished is to worsen the situation and undermine its own credibility:

The orthodox approach to the peace process has harmed American interests by wasting the most valuable commodity the American government possesses: the time of its senior officials. It has done harm as well by diverting attention from the real cause of the conflict—the Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy and permanence of Israel—thereby reducing the already small chance of ending it. Worst of all, the peace process has actually obstructed a settlement of the conflict by supporting—unintentionally—the current Palestinian strategy for eliminating the Jewish state. . . .

In recent years, . . . the Palestinians and their allies have adopted a . . . strategy [of] delegitimization. They have sought to portray Israel as a neocolonial power that practices the kind of discrimination that characterized apartheid-era South Africa. . . .

This strategy will also fail, not least because the charges it levels are false. Nonetheless, the peace process has given the champions of the strategy of delegitimization reason to believe that it can work. The Palestinian authorities, led first by Yasir Arafat and now by Mahmoud Abbas, have managed to ensure the failure of all negotiations with Israel by their intransigence while at the same time avoiding responsibility for that failure. Successive American administrations have refrained from telling the world—clearly, emphatically, and repeatedly—precisely why the peace process has never succeeded. The Obama administration has in fact blamed Israel.

By failing to rebut the false narrative about the fate of the peace process and, even worse, by occasionally propagating it, the American government has reinforced the strategy of delegitimization and made the faint chances of settling the conflict even fainter.

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.