To Martin Kramer, the Trump administration’s recent proposal for Israel and the Palestinians is best understood as a partition plan and therefore, like the UN’s 1947 partition plan, Palestinian leaders need not accept it for it to shape the future. Indeed, Kramer believes it is unlikely that all, or even most, of the plan’s details will be put into effect—but that it will nevertheless have a lasting impact on the nature of the conflict, most importantly by demonstrating to the Palestinians that they cannot simply wait for history to reverse itself but must begin to reckon with the reality of Israel’s existence. Kramer discusses this and other topics in conversation with Gregg Roman. (Audio, 15 minutes. A transcript is available here.)

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.