Next week, a runoff election will determine who will replace Nir Barkat as the mayor of Israel’s capital. Clifford May holds up one of Barkat’s initiatives as an example of the sort of improvements that can be made in Palestinians’ quality of life while the “peace process” remains dormant:

Barkat recently announced that he was replacing the UN Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) in eastern Jerusalem’s Shuafat refugee camp. Charging that the agency has “failed utterly” to provide adequate sanitation, health care, education, and welfare, and that it not just tolerates but incites terrorism, Barkat committed the municipal government to assuming responsibility for Shuafat’s 30,000 residents who, he said, should be treated “like any other residents” of the capital.

If this initiative succeeds, it could constitute a kind of peace process—albeit one carried out by people in the streets rather than by diplomats in drawing rooms. Over time, it could shift the calculus of Palestinians in the West Bank, and perhaps even those in Gaza. Imagine what it would mean if the next generation of Palestinian leaders did not oppose “normalizing” relations with Israelis. Imagine if jihadist terrorists were no longer glorified as martyrs in Palestinian mosques and media. Imagine if Palestinians willing to work with Israelis for the benefit of both peoples were no longer condemned as apostates and traitors.

I don’t expect any of that to come to pass while President Trump is in the White House. But, [by cutting U.S. funding for UNRWA and moving the American embassy to Jerusalem], he has . . . made clear that Palestinians can have a state of their own, but only if they recognize that a two-state solution implies two states for two peoples, both willing to co-exist peacefully. That may not amount to the “deal of the century,” but it’s more than any past peace process achieved.

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.