A professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, Ian Lustick is recently the author of Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality, a book that bemoans Israel’s supposed failure to create a Palestinian state in the territory now under its control. To Lustick, this failure can be attributed to an Israeli inclination toward “distrust and territorial maximalism rather than inclinations to compromise,” compounded by a culture of “Holocaustia” that “tells Israeli Jews what it means to be a Jew,” and facilitated by the power of the “Israel lobby.” Yisrael Medad writes in his review:

Mandate-era history is ignored by Lustick, which would have provided some qualifying historical context to his central argument. The truth is that the two-state solution was not “lost” recently, but had been attempted, and had failed, and failed again, long ago.

Lustick does not confront the character of “Palestinian Arab nationalism,” the course of its history, or its hostility to the entire notion of a Jewish homeland. This failure is typical of proponents of the two-state solution. One might say it is a necessary failure.

The cornerstone of the Arab rejection of two-state solution was laid in July 1919 at the Syrian Arab Congress in Damascus. The resolutions adopted there, in their essence, remain in place: “We reject the claims of the Zionists for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in that part of southern Syria which is known as Palestine, and we are opposed to Jewish immigration into any part of the country.”

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.