On Tuesday and Wednesday, delegates from across the Middle East met in Bahrain to discuss, among other things, the “economic portion” of the Trump administration’s proposal for Israeli-Palestinian peace; its political complement remains under wraps. The Palestinian Authority (PA), boycotted the meeting and rejected the plan even before it was made public, while most foreign-policy experts have been sharply critical of its contents. Comparing this plan with those that preceded it, Jonathan Tobin writes:

All previous administrations have paid some lip service to economic issues, with many issuing their own plans that were not dissimilar to the one President Trump just proposed. They have all taken the approach the Palestinians say they prefer: [to attempt] to strong-arm Israel into agreeing to a two-state solution. Yet that strategy never succeeded, no matter how much pressure presidents like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama put on the Jewish state, and no matter how many times Israel said “yes” to two states as they did a number of times in the past twenty years. . . . At some point, the foreign-policy professionals should have figured out that the old approach was never going to work.

That is, in essence, what [Jared Kushner], [Jason] Greenblatt, and company have done by attempting to restart the conversation about peace in a different way. . . . Trump was right to try to end his predecessors’ coddling of Palestinian fantasies of defeating Israel, which is what their policies of non-recognition of Jerusalem and refusing to condition aid on ending support for terror amounted to.

The problem is that the Palestinians’ century-old war on Zionism has become inextricably linked to their national identity to the point where it is impossible for anyone inside their political structure to imagine normal life alongside a Jewish state. . . . If Trump’s plan is going to fail—and it will—[failure] can be attributed to these reasons. It’s not because previous administrations understood the conflict any better, or that the focus on economics is wrongheaded. If this latest approach doesn’t work, then the blame should fall on those responsible—the Palestinians—not on the ideas behind the plan itself.

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.