A few weeks ago, Benjamin Netanyahu made a pre-election promise about the Jordan Valley, obtained by Israel during the Six-Day War. His statement, misreported as an intention to annex the territory—instead he spoke of applying Israeli sovereignty to parts of it—raised a predictable hue and cry. But, notes Gershon Hacohen, the statement was perfectly in keeping with the thinking of Israeli leaders from Levi Eshkol to Yitzḥak Rabin, and is rooted in the Jewish state’s strategic needs. Hacohen explains the flaws in the thinking that in 2000 led then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak to deviate from this position:

After the peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, and especially after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s army in the Iraq war (2003), it has been increasingly argued that the threat of an eastern front has passed and controlling the Jordan Valley is no longer crucial to Israel’s security. Even [in 1994], this argument was divorced from a basic understanding of the phenomenon of war.

Since that time, in light of the lessons of the [second intifada], the “Arab Spring,” Hizballah’s enormous missile arsenal, and the strengthening of . . . Hamas, as well as Tehran’s growing expansionism—which [could give Iran the potential to] deploy Shiite militias in a new front along Israel’s main [north-south] artery (Highway 6)—the Jordan Valley’s status as a vital Israeli security interest has only increased.

Most [Israeli] advocates of a Palestinian state say it will be demilitarized and unable to threaten Israel’s security. During the Oslo years, the PLO feigned acceptance of demilitarization and signed a number of agreements to this specific effect, only to violate them flagrantly as the West Bank and Gaza were transformed into hothouses of terror. The failure of the UN forces in Lebanon . . . to prevent Hizballah from arming itself in the south of that country shows why proposals to deploy international forces in a similar role in the Jordan Valley cannot guarantee a true demilitarization. Thus the Jordan Valley, as a buffer zone controlled by the IDF, is an existential necessity when it comes to Israel’s security.

In addition to the security issue, the Jordan Valley in its full geographical scope can house millions of Israelis and provide a location for national infrastructure that cannot be compressed into the coastal plain. . . . In an era of peace, a developed infrastructure of roads [there] could once again turn the Land of Israel into a vital land bridge between Asia and Africa.

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.