Unlike some previous proposals for the creation of a Palestinian state, the recent U.S. peace plan leaves the easternmost area of the West Bank under Israeli control. This arrangement also strengthens the security of the Kingdom of Jordan, writes Efraim Inbar, which has itself long seen the Palestinian national movement as a threat:

Israel and Jordan share various interests, including support for the American presence in the region, opposing pan-Arab and pan-Islamic movements and, of course, fighting the rise of radical Islam, Sunni or Shiite. Amman also sees eye to eye with Jerusalem on the issue of the Iranian threat. Israel assists Jordan by deterring extremists from threatening it, while Israel, for its part, sees Jordan as a buffer state between it and the extremist entities east of the kingdom.

Jordan is certainly not interested in a neighboring political entity that could develop another Hamas-controlled Gaza. Israeli military control of the Jordan Valley is convenient for Jordan, as it protects Amman from the west.

Since the [two countries] signed a peace agreement in 1994, Jordan’s dependence on Israel has increased. Israel supplies it with increasing quantities of water, far beyond its obligation under the deal, and it also supplies it with natural gas. . . . Moreover, it is hard to imagine that Saudi Arabia, other Persian Gulf countries, or Egypt will go to great lengths to prevent an Israeli annexation of 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.