For the past 24 years, both the U.S. and Israel have been wedded to the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, an idea that has been endorsed officially by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama administrations. Giora Eiland argues that, given the evident failure of this plan, the time is ripe for Israel, in concert with the incoming American presidential administration, to give serious consideration to the alternatives:

[The two-state solution] is based on four assumptions. One, the solution to the conflict should be geographically restricted to the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Two, the solution requires the establishment of a Palestinian state with full sovereignty. Three, the border between Israel and Palestine should be based on the pre-1967 lines. Four, the West Bank and Gaza must constitute a single diplomatic entity.

These four assumptions create very limited room for negotiations. . . . If we free ourselves from them and try to look into the entire range of possible solutions, we will find that some of the other solutions have outstanding advantages over the only solution currently on the table. . . .

Among the other solutions, we can talk about a “regional solution” with land swaps between four players—Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Palestine—or about the creation of a federation between Jordan and the West Bank, or about a functional, not necessarily territorial, division between Israel and the Palestinians. And yes, even the plan advanced by Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, to annex Area C [of the West Bank, where most of the Jewish settlements are concentrated] and establish Palestinian autonomy in the remainder of the territory.

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.