On Tuesday, the former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz, who is campaigning for a third time to oust Benjamin Netanyahu from the Israeli premiership, announced that if elected he will seek to annex the Jordan Valley. He added the important caveat that he wants to do so “in coordination with the international community”—a promise that, as many have pointed out, is nearly impossible to fulfill. While it is easy to speculate about the political calculations behind this pledge, Jonathan Tobin suggests that it is also intended as a message to American liberals:

Listen to any of the Democratic candidates for president talk about the Middle East, and all you hear are promises to pressure Israel to do exactly what both Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert tried to do: trade land for peace. . . . The only significant difference among them is whether that pressure would come in the form of gentle urging or of a brutal push in which U.S. aid to the Jewish state would be withheld as part of a diplomatic quid pro quo.

The same sort of sentiments can be heard from many of those who purport to represent the interests of the American Jewish community. . . . Gantz’s continued efforts to tilt to the right reveal how out of touch Americans are when it comes to the conflict with the Palestinians. It also shows how out of touch Jewish Americans are with the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of Israelis. Their critiques of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government not only ring hollow; it’s just as likely that the only alternative to the Likud will also disappoint them, since Gantz’s views on security issues are fairly close to those of the [current] prime minister.

If they were not so blind to the reality of Palestinian intransigence, Donald Trump’s would-be opponents might be listening to Gantz and his talk about the Jordan Valley. If they did, they’d realize that their plans to pressure Israel are based on magical thinking about peace that sensible Israelis from left to right abandoned years ago. Sensible Americans should do the same.

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.