While Dan Schueftan is skeptical about the benefits of applying Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank settlements, located mostly in the vicinity of Jerusalem, he believes that the Jewish state has much to gain from applying its sovereignty to the Jordan Valley. Otherwise, Israel would be left entirely unable to protect its eastern border:

In 2014 General John Allen, the security adviser to then-Secretary of State John Kerry, suggested a plan that was based on much goodwill yet little understanding of the conditions in the Middle East. . . . The plan included Palestinian sovereignty in the Jordan Valley. The answer to Israel’s security fears would be sensors, unmanned aircraft, satellites, and other technological devices. There was also talk of foreign troops, possibly American, being stationed along the banks of the Jordan River, and a possibility of a U.S.-Israel deal ensuring American support for unilateral moves by Israel when responding to threats on its security.

Establishing [sovereignty] in the Jordan Valley entails abandoning the delusional idea of Israeli and Jordanian security based on technology and foreign presence. What Israel needs is not information on threats and the hope that someone else will respond before it’s too late. Rather, it needs deterrence that comes with a good chance of prevention and an Israeli force that will neutralize threats when needed.

A scheme like the Allen plan is much worse than no arrangement at all. Without it, Israel acts “defiantly” against threats when it sees them, and foreign diplomats protest after they are successfully neutralized. Since decolonization in the mid-20th century, the fate of a foreign military presence in sovereign land of a hostile country has been grim. This scheme will postpone and [enfeeble] the Israeli response to perceived threats and will give the Palestinians an effective tool to damage Israel’s relations with the U.S.

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.