At the recent annual conference of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), its executive director declared the organization’s total commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Isi Leibler sees this move as a misguided attempt to regain support from younger, left-leaning Jews and thus maintain AIPAC’s bipartisan bona fides:

American Jews, like Israelis, are entitled to have varying views on the two-state solution. But in the face of the intensified Palestinian Authority campaign of terror and incitement, most Israelis, like myself, who once supported a two-state solution now realize that it is impossible.

The Palestinians have one goal—Israel’s destruction. A nascent terrorist state in Judea and Samaria would be opposed by a clear majority of Israelis across the political spectrum. For diplomatic reasons, the government has not explicitly stated this but it has assiduously avoided endorsing a two-state solution. . . . Even the Trump administration has repeatedly announced that it would support any decision both parties endorsed and did not call for a two-state solution.

Thus, it is with incredible hutzpah that an organization purporting to act with Israel’s and America’s best interests in mind has formally adopted a two-state policy. AIPAC is, in effect, pressuring Israel to move beyond what President Trump himself has demanded, and is encouraging the administration and Congress to pressure Israel in this direction.

This outrageous behavior will not induce liberals to support AIPAC but may encourage our American supporters to view Israel as intransigent and press it to make further concessions. . . . The only way to strengthen Israel’s support among Democrats and liberals is painstakingly to explain the case for Israel, which is not difficult—if they are willing to listen.

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.