In what is now the standard version of the two-state solution, a newly created Palestinian state would have as its eastern border the Jordan River. But such an outcome would pose a serious threat to regional stability—a fact behind Israel’s plans to extend its sovereignty to this strip of land. Yaacov Ayish explains:

The valley is a natural barrier and Israel’s longest border, separating Jordan from Israel and the West Bank. Compared to the pre-1967 armistice lines, it provides Israel with much-needed strategic depth. . . . Through Israel’s close security relationship with Jordan, this depth also extends east. Ties between Jerusalem and Amman are anchored by a 1994 peace treaty, and include extensive military and intelligence cooperation. Israel also supplies water and natural gas to the kingdom, which has limited natural resources.

By applying its law to the Jordan Valley, Israel would be able to contribute permanently to Jordan’s stability and its own. IDF forces already routinely thwart arms smuggling and other terrorist activities along the Jordan River. Continued Israeli presence will prevent the valley, and by extension the West Bank, from devolving into a terrorist haven akin to Gaza. Such a scenario in a territory adjacent to Jordan, whose population is majority Palestinian, would dangerously undermine Jordanian security. For Israel, when compounded with existing threats, it could be disastrous.

The territory’s topography likewise presents a clear advantage, allowing Israeli troops to . . . monitor incoming threats, whether from Jordan, Iraq, or Syria. It also requires any invading forces to launch an uphill attack when proceeding westward, making defense easier and granting Israel valuable time to mobilize reserve troops.

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.