Israel seized the Golan Heights—an area whose Jewish history goes back to biblical times—from Syria during the Six-Day War and formally applied Israeli law there in 1981. While the U.S. has from time to time encouraged or pressured Jerusalem to enter negotiations for returning the territory to Damascus, any such idea, given Syria’s current state of affairs, is at present a nonstarter. Therefore, argue Moshe Ya’alon and Yair Lapid, it’s high time for Washington, and the rest of the world, to recognize Israeli sovereignty there:

The Golan Heights is . . . a mountainous region of around 695 square miles in the north of Israel. It’s worth noting, of course, that [the region] is entirely unrelated to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. Not a single Palestinian lives there. . . . The Syrians . . . ruled over the Golan Heights for only 21 years, from 1946 and 1967. During those years they turned the Golan into a military base, rained rocket fire on the Israeli communities [below], and tried to divert Israel’s critical water sources. . . .

In the 51 years [it has controlled the area], Israel developed the Golan Heights and turned it into an impressive center of nature reserves and tourism, with high-tech agriculture, award-winning wines, a flourishing food-tech industry, and in-demand boutique hotels. The Druze population of the Golan Heights, who make up about half the population, were granted all the same rights as all other citizens of Israel. . . .

On the other side of the border, life went in the other direction; in the past seven years President Assad has massacred over a half-million of his own people and [caused] the displacement of eleven million more. He let the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hizballah, the largest terror organizations in the world, into Syria. He encouraged Shiite militias from Iraq and elsewhere to flood into his country. . . .

The man who didn’t hesitate to use chemical weapons against women and children continues to demand the Golan Heights in the name of “international law.” The fact that anyone in the Western world still takes that argument seriously is worse than naïve—it’s insane. Does his monstrous behavior have no cost? . . . The international community, led by the United States, needs to do the simple thing: to announce that they see the world as it is.

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.