Benjamin Netanyahu has more than once said that, if given another term as prime minister, he would apply Israeli law to the Jordan Valley—raising a predictable hue and cry. Responding to those among Netanyahu’s critics who argue that this area must inevitably be part of a future Palestinian state, Amir Avivi writes:

The Jordan River border is over 180 miles long and can be crossed at any point. The Palestinians would be able to exercise the “right of return” and bring into the heart of Israel hundreds of thousands of terrorists from all around the Middle East, with an endless number of weapons, posing an existential threat to the . . . low plains of central Israel. In Gaza the same ideas resulted in the takeover by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. . . . All the weapons in Gaza are smuggled through a seven-mile border with Egypt through tunnels. To reverse [the Gaza withdrawal alone] would mean a war with thousands of casualties.

[There are those who claim that] Israel applying sovereignty over the Jordan Valley . . . will undermine security cooperation with Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. The same threats were made when President Donald Trump moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, but none of these predictions came true for a very simple reason. Both Jordan and the Palestinian Authority depend on the security cooperation with Israel for their survival. They need this cooperation more than Israel does. So, it would be reasonable to assume that nothing dramatic will occur after Israel applies sovereignty over the Jordan Valley.

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.