On Thursday night, the Trump administration announced that, while it does not believe “the existence of [Israeli] settlements [in the West Bank] is an impediment to peace,” it does believe “the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful in achieving that goal.” The American press by and large interpreted the statement as an endorsement of the previous administration’s attitude, with the New York Times running a report under the headline “Trump Embraces Pillars of Obama’s Foreign Policy.” However, writes John Podhoretz, the opposite is true:

What [the recent White House statement] does, in effect, is return the United States to the . . . policy outlined in a letter sent from George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon in 2004. In that letter, Bush [accepted] the reality that the most populous Israeli settlements beyond the pre-1967 borders would certainly remain in Israeli hands at the end of any successful peace negotiation with the Palestinians. And according to the officials who negotiated the matter, . . . it was understood that the expansion of existing population centers due to natural growth (families getting larger, people moving in) should not be considered a violation of the idea that there should be no new settlements. For if, like New York City, [the town of] Ariel gets more populous, its land mass does not increase in size, just the number of people living there.

The Obama administration did not like these ideas, and reversed them. Its conception of a “settlement freeze” was that it be a freeze on the number of settlers as well as the number of settlements. Add new apartments to Ariel, and you were “expanding the settlements.”

The Trump language puts an end to that idea. It says “the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing settlements beyond their current borders may not be helpful.” This returns U.S. policy to the notion that the physical acreage holding settlers should not increase but that the number of settlers is not at issue. This is a wholesale shift in America’s approach.

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.