Comparing the White House proposal for ending the Israel-Palestinian conflict with that offered by the Obama administration, Gershon Hacohen sees it as a historic opportunity:

By way of imposing a solution on the Israeli government, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry tasked General John Allen with crafting a security plan that would allay Israel’s security concerns about an almost total withdrawal from the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley. . . . With that plan the [Obama] administration sought to fulfill its commitment to Israel’s security while rejecting its demand for defensible borders that do not conform to the 1967 lines.

The greatness of the Trump plan lies in the fact that unlike preceding American peace initiatives, it recognizes Israel’s right to retain territories beyond the 1967 lines as a matter of historical right and not solely as a measure to be taken for security purposes. Though the plan does not grant Israel all it desires, it plainly repudiates the precedent established by the peace treaty with Egypt, which mandated a complete Israeli withdrawal to the last centimeter.

Israel has received a precious gift, and it must decide what to make of the potential it harbors. About such moments [the Talmud] said: “There are those who gain the world in a single moment and there are those who lose the world in a single moment.”

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.