While Israelis were voting last week, the fact that the Palestinian Authority has not held elections in ten years was hardly lost on many Palestinians. Evelyn Gordon argues that—contrary to the declarations of the liberal Western media—the lack of Palestinian democracy is a much bigger obstacle to peace than the choices made by Israel’s democracy:

[A]side from the fact that [the PA’s] denial of basic civil rights is bad in general, it has real implications for the peace process. . . . If Israelis see a chance for peace and consider their own prime minister an obstacle to it, they can unseat him—an option they’ve in fact exercised in the past. Palestinians have no such option.

But the problem goes deeper than that: [Mahmoud] Abbas, now in the eleventh year of his four-year term, also lacks the democratic legitimacy needed to make the kind of concessions any peace agreement would entail. Palestinian human-rights activist Bassem Eid summed up the issue bluntly . . . : Abbas, he told his shocked audience, will never be able to make peace with Israel, because he currently represents nobody except himself, his wife, and his two sons. . . .

[I]f Western leaders are serious about wanting Israeli-Palestinian peace, working to rectify the lack of Palestinian democracy would be far more productive than wringing their hands over the choices made by Israel’s democracy. For precisely because Israelis can always change their minds again in a few years, the Palestinian democracy deficit is far more detrimental to the prospects for peace than the outcome of any Israeli election ever could be.

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.