Since the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israelis have been subject to repeated waves of terror, armed groups have established bases close to Israel’s population centers, Palestinians have suffered immiseration at the hands of corrupt or fanatical tyrants, and Israeli Arabs have become increasingly radicalized. Meanwhile, Israel has received no credit from the international community for ending its occupation of Gaza and parts of the West Bank, while the PLO stands high in international opinion. Efraim Karsh comments on the opportunities Israel has forgone by adhering to so radically flawed an attempt at peacemaking:

What makes this state of affairs all the more tragic is that at the time of the Oslo Accords, the Yitzḥak Rabin government had a potentially far better peace partner in the form of the West Bank and Gaza leadership. . . .

Unlike the PLO’s diaspora constituents (the “outside,” in Palestinian parlance), who upheld the extremist dream of returning to their 1948 dwellings at the cost of Israel’s destruction, West Bankers and Gazans (the “inside”) were amenable to a peaceful coexistence that would allow them to get on with their lives and sustain the astounding economic boom that had begun under Israel’s control.

While the “outside” had no direct interaction with Israelis (or, for that matter, with any other democratic system), Israel’s prolonged rule had given the “inside” Palestinians a far more realistic and less extreme perspective. Hence their perception of Israel as more democratic than the major Western nations; hence their opposition to terror attacks and overwhelming support for the abolition of those clauses in the Palestinian Charter that called for Israel’s destruction; and hence their indifference to the thorniest issue of the Palestinian-Israeli dispute, and the one central to the PLO’s persistent effort to destroy Israel through demographic subversion: namely, the “right of return.” . . .

But . . . instead of seizing [the very real possibility of] opting for the peace partner who was far better attuned to the needs and wishes of the local Palestinian populace, and against his own personal inclination to strike a deal with the “moderate insiders” rather than with the “extremist Tunis people [i.e., the PLO leadership],” Rabin was talked by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and his deputy Yossi Beilin into surrendering the West Bankers and Gazans to an unreconstructed terror organization.

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.