As an active member of Israel’s moderate left, Einat Wilf would have preferred the new U.S. peace proposal to make additional concessions to the Palestinians on various issues. She argues, however, that quibbles over details make little difference. Palestinian leaders will not make peace under any circumstances:

Much of the genuine criticism of Donald Trump’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan for the Middle East emerges from the assumption that there is another plan to be found; a better, more just, and fairer one, to which the Palestinians would say yes, and which would then truly bring about peace. I wish it were so, but sadly there is no evidence for such an assumption.

[D]ecades of determined words and actions have made it very clear that the Palestinian leadership will say yes only to plans that bring about the end of Israel as the sovereign state of the Jewish people. [In their view], if the price of an Arab state of Palestine is that the Jewish people will be allowed to retain a sovereign state and self-rule in another part of the land, whichever part that is, then that is too high a price to pay.

This is a painful realization which for many left-wing Israelis, like myself, was purchased in decades of dashed hopes watching Palestinian leaders walk away from opportunity after opportunity, and in the blood of families blown to bits by suicide bombers days after Palestinians could have had a state. Yet it is the reason the Trump plan has been embraced by the vast majority of Israel’s Jews, left and right.

The plan of the current administration will bring neither peace nor prosperity for the Palestinians, as they will continue consistently and predictably to say no—but it could just bring greater peace between Israel and the Arab world, who hopefully will come one day to recognize Israel and the sovereign Jews as a legitimate presence in the region.

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.