Interviewed by Neri Zilber, Efraim Inbar compares the current American proposal for creating a Palestinian state with the plan for territorial compromise set forth by the Labor politician Yigal Allon in the aftermath of the Six-Day War. Like that plan, the new plan “gives Israel control over the Jordan Valley, keeping Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty,” while proposing withdrawal from other West Bank territory. To Zilber’s question of whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be willing to go along with it, Inbar responds:

Netanyahu was and is willing to make territorial compromises with the Palestinians if they behave. Netanyahu has in fact [always] been in the “left wing” of his Likud party, and I’ve heard he’s not averse to giving up additional land for a good deal. But of course, a good deal in his eyes is different from a good deal in Palestinian eyes. And the proof of this is that he accepted the Trump plan as well as indirectly the idea of a Palestinian state, which is included in the Trump plan. And his right wing . . . is up in arms.

Even during the Obama administration, Netanyahu was willing to say yes to [then-Secretary of State] John Kerry in the spring of 2014, including giving up sovereignty in exchange for [Israeli] military control over the Jordan Valley.

Most importantly, argues Inbar, the new peace plan is “definitely not” a solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict:

It’s very naïve if you think you can stop this conflict. It’s over 100 years old, but compared with other protracted, territorial-religious conflicts it’s still young. . . . I do not believe we should be speaking in terms of solutions but rather in terms of managing and limiting the conflict for both sides. The conflict cannot be solved. . . . In the meantime, we should try to manage it within bearable parameters.

[Israel] can never give up security control over the West Bank. The Trump plan acknowledges that. Israel will continue doing what it does now. The status quo is bearable, and I do not see the Palestinians being able to fulfill the minimum criterion of a state, which is the monopoly over the use of force. This is not only a Palestinian problem, but a general Arab political and cultural problem 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.