Of the many attempts in the past seven decades to negotiate an end to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, none has borne fruit. To Haviv Rettig Gur, this futility results from the inability of leaders of both sides, as well as of such third parties as the United States, to grasp the truth about their predicament:

The peace process was forged by a class of individuals possessing an exceptionally well-developed capacity for selective blindness. Some Israeli leaders—Yitzḥak Rabin, for instance—believed they could forge with Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the sort of cold but dependable standoff Israel had maintained with each Egyptian dictator since Anwar Sadat. Other Israelis—[the hard-left journalist and politician] Yossi Beilin is one example—believed they were negotiating a real reconciliation, apparently because they themselves yearned for it so intensely that they could not really fathom that it might not be reciprocated by the other side.

Both sorts of Israelis were determined to ignore the domestic Palestinian discourse advanced by Arafat and others that resisted reconciliation, elevated the ideological rejection of Israel to the level of civic religion, and openly glorified brutality against Israelis—and this was in the happy early years of Oslo peacemaking, the mid-1990s, to which more than a few of today’s despairing progressives look for inspiration.

The Palestinian side, too, was gripped by a strategic blindness that transformed peacemaking efforts into a recipe for permanent war. The PLO turned to peace talks after the first Gulf war, when American power in the region was ascendant. It was a strategic concession, not a historic turnaround. The fundamental Palestinian predicament, even today, is not in any simple sense the specific Israeli presence in the West Bank. Fatah, [the PLO’s dominant faction], was founded in 1964, not 1967, and saw its mission as addressing a deeper and older problem: . . . the problem of a nation dispossessed of its homeland whose very identity had coalesced around that loss. It is Israel itself, invasive, Jewish, a standing reproach to Arab powerlessness and decline—and, more galling, to Muslim incapacity in defending the shrines at Jerusalem’s sacred center. . . .

One can murder colonists until they return to their home country or tyrants until they abandon their unjust oppression. But how does one terrorize a nation with nowhere else to go? The Israelis are no more capable of resolving the Palestinians’ primordial predicament of displacement—for example, by fulfilling their redemption fantasy of return across the Green Line—than the Palestinians are of leaving this land quietly to the Jews.

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.