Since the White House released its proposal for resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict, numerous critics have stepped forward to argue that it will never work. While Michael Doran agrees with them “completely,” he also believes their position is “nonsensical, because it assumes they know that there is a solution out there” that will work. He discusses his concerns in depth with Jon Lerner, who, during his tenure in the Trump administration in 2017 and 2018, was involved in discussions leading up to the proposal. In Lerner’s understanding, its crafters didn’t intend to dictate terms to the parties; nor did they expect the outcome to be a “signing ceremony on the White House lawn.” Rather they wished to reshape the conflict to the benefit of both Israeli and Palestinians, and to create a more realistic framework for future negotiations. (Video, 67 minutes.)

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.