According to a recent survey of Israeli and Palestinian public opinion, slim majorities—53 percent of Israelis and 51 percent of Palestinians—support a two-state solution in principle. But when pollsters add questions about the compromises needed to implement such a plan—over Jerusalem, security measures, the Temple Mount, and the return of refugees—the majorities quickly became minorities. Elliott Abrams looks at what the data mean for the future of the peace process:

Relentless optimists have long argued that Israel and the Palestinians are an inch apart and, as former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta put it in 2011, peace can be attained if they would “just get to the damn table.” Wrong. . . .

There are some other interesting findings [in this poll]. . . . [I]f a peace deal would mean peace with all the Arab states, 26 percent of Israeli Jews would change their negative view and vote yes. And . . . 29 percent of Palestinians would change their minds and accept a deal if the new Palestinian state and Jordan became a confederation. It’s interesting that the pollsters included this sensitive question, and remarkable that confederation with Jordan is viewed positively by so many Palestinians.

The old Palestinian Authority/PLO leadership in Ramallah doesn’t want to talk about such a possibility, for many reasons. Their gravy train would end if the Jordanian government ran things. And the idea that every Palestinian heart pines for sovereignty in a separate Palestinian state, which has been the key PLO position for decades, is obviously undermined by finding that Palestinians may be more pragmatic than their “leaders” about what the future may hold.

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.