Rumors circulating in the press and affirmed by prominent American supporters of Israel have it that the prime minister asked President Trump not to make good on his campaign promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Nonsense, writes Evelyn Gordon, and dangerous nonsense at that:

To understand just how ludicrous [this rumor] is, contrast it with another one making the rounds: that Netanyahu also asked Trump to pressure him to restrain settlement construction. . . . Netanyahu has many reasons for wanting such pressure. But none of those reasons applies to the embassy issue. Moving the embassy poses no risk [of European retaliation], because while settlement construction is an Israeli decision, the embassy location is strictly an American one. Even the EU wouldn’t punish Israel for a White House decision. The same goes for American Jewry. . . .

[Furthermore], failure to move the embassy increases pressure [on Netanyahu] from his right-wing base to provide compensation in the form of increased settlement construction. . . .

The [Trump] administration’s internal battle over this issue . . . provides a far more convincing explanation of Trump’s backtracking on the embassy than intervention by Netanyahu. . . .

Israel has striven unsuccessfully for decades to get the world to accept Jerusalem as its capital, and just this year, it has finally started scoring some victories. . . . Yet now, some of Israel’s strongest supporters are . . . giving the rest of the world a perfect excuse for maintaining the status quo of non-recognition. No government will be more pro-Israel than Israel’s own, so if even Netanyahu doesn’t really want Jerusalem to be treated as Israel’s capital, what foreign government would?

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.