At a recent televised debate among candidates for re-election to the Knesset, the participants astutely identified the problems with their interlocutors’ positions. But when it came to the crucial issue of relations with the Palestinians, none was able to present a convincing solution. To Haviv Rettig Gur, who served as the one non-politician on the panel, the lack of ideas stems from “a broader national bewilderment”:

A majority of Israelis want to separate from the Palestinians. A majority—who overlap a great deal with the previous group—also believe an Israeli withdrawal is unlikely to deliver safety. And so, in a sense, everyone is right.

Hilik Bar [of the Zionist Camp party] insisted that Palestinian independence would increase, not decrease, the political window for an Israeli military response to any post-withdrawal attacks. Ayelet Shaked [of Jewish Home] calmly pointed out that the Gaza situation didn’t quite work out that way.

Shaked insisted the country could “manage the conflict,” leading Yaakov Peri [of Yesh Atid] to retort that instead the conflict was “managing” the country, holding an outsized role in setting the national agenda. . . .

At the end of the day, after a long string of failed peace talks, Israelis no longer believe in the policy narratives of the past. They do not believe peace is attainable in the near term, or that annexation might resolve the fundamental questions of the conflict. And neither, it seems, do the candidates in this election.

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.