While Amman has for some time endorsed Palestinian statehood in the West Bank, thus implicitly relinquishing its claims to the territory, Hillel Frisch and Yitzḥak Sokoloff argue that the Hashemite monarchy might still be willing to play a role in creating some alternative resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The first step would be American and Arab investment in making the kingdom strong and prosperous:

The gravitational force of a prosperous Jordan would expand the functional links that have always existed between the cities of the West Bank and Amman. It would encourage Palestinians in the West Bank to look to ties with Jordan as the best guarantee of their political and economic future. Because of this, Jordan has the potential (once again) to become a major stabilizing influence on Palestinian politics, which would serve the interests of Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinian people.

The reemergence of a Jordanian role in the disposition of the West Bank is much preferable to the current international fixation on the concept of an independent, contiguous Palestinian state with borders based on the 1967 lines. Such a state would be no less of a long-term strategic threat today than it was before the Oslo Accords. So, too, is Palestinian irredentism a threat to Jordan’s security. . . .

A strong and stable Jordan could provide an alternative to the model of a two-state solution that depends on the Palestinian Authority. Such a vision will not only attenuate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, [but] will [also] bolster Jordan, whose importance to regional stability has never been so crucial. . . .

The Saudis and the Gulf states should provide [Jordan with financial backing]. The U.S. should prod them to do so for their own good, but also to reciprocate for the American security umbrella under which they have been living ever since Saddam Hussein occupied Kuwait. . . . Regionally, Jordan has never been a more important strategic asset for Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies or more worthy of investment. It defends what remains of these states’ northern flank against Syrian-Iranian encroachment and helps balance the threat Shiite Iraq poses to Saudi Arabia’s eastern border, critically close to its major oil fields.

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.