On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the U.S. no longer held it a violation of international law for Jews to live or build houses on lands acquired by Israel during the Six-Day War. This opinion runs contrary to the stance of the Carter and Obama administrations, as well as that of most West European governments, but rests on a coherent and logical understanding of the law. Amnon Lord explains its significance:

[The American decision] is proof that standing tenaciously for years on solid and consistent legal ground ultimately ends in international recognition. If Israel had surrendered to the views of [its own] “new-wave” jurists, who created a propagandist and false presentation of the legal status of the territories in Judea, Samaria, and the Jordan Valley, even the most supportive [U.S.] administration . . . wouldn’t have lifted a finger on the matter. From this perspective, anyone who has argued and expounded on this legal and historical position over the years in American, international, and local forums deserves credit for the Trump administration’s diplomatic revolution.

What’s needed now is the establishment of an Israeli government capable of providing significance and substance to the new American policy. The declaration further enhances Donald Trump’s policy, which he has been unfurling for three years now, whereby, the 1967 lines no longer represent a baseline for a future peace deal.

This new policy does not negate or supersede the possibility of a deal with the Palestinians; but at the same time, it also doesn’t prohibit Israel from possibly imposing its sovereignty over these strategic territories, which are so crucial to its security, or over specific settlement areas themselves. Israel’s Supreme Court also recognizes the legality of these communities.

The imperative for the country [now] is a national-unity or right-wing government capable of using this diplomatic gift. And it is a gift that in many ways is more important than moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.

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.