During the Israel-Palestinian negotiations at Camp David in 2000, Israel’s then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak came to then-President Bill Clinton with an offer for the creation of a Palestinian state, complete with many concessions on what seemed to be key points of contention. Delighted at having finally achieved a breakthrough, Clinton brought the offer to Yasir Arafat—who promptly rejected it, refusing even to make a counteroffer or to list for the horrified American president his objections to the proposal. As this scene has played out time and again over the decades, Ran Baratz suggests that attempts at peacemaking are based on faulty assumptions:

[Peace] talks always fail because the Palestinians are not interested in negotiating a permanent agreement. [Rejecting such agreements] is not a negotiation tactic that fails each time, but the exact opposite: it is a successful strategy of abstention. . . . If this theory sounds strange, it is only because we have become accustomed not only to the idea that everyone always prefers a peace treaty but also to the paradigm that is rooted in [so-called] “missed historical opportunities.”

The truth is that when there is joint will to reach an agreement, there is no need for unique “historical opportunities.” But when there is no such will, there is only an illusion of opportunities. The bitter joke that “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” is completely illogical. Since the Palestinians don’t want the end that these “opportunities” present, for them these are not opportunities at all—more like historical traps. That is why they need to be avoided rather than taken advantage of. . . .

If President Trump [is interested in resuming the peace process], I would ask him to perform a simple test: before he commits to negotiations, he should ask the Palestinians for their peace plan—the Israelis’ he has long had. If he receives one, by all means, try another round of negotiations. But if the Palestinians send him—as Arafat used to say—“to drink Gaza’s seawater,” it’s a sign that nothing has changed and failure is looming on the horizon.

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.