The State Department reportedly decided last week to allow Jibril Rajoub, a high-ranking Fatah official, to take part in upcoming meetings with American diplomats in the U.S., despite his history of participation in terror and his ongoing, repeated encouragement of attacks on Israeli civilians. Michael Rubin comments:

Let’s put aside the irony of [a State Department official] having to pair the insistence that Rajoub supports “a peaceful, non-violent solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” with the need to press him “to refrain from any statements or actions” that could legitimize violence. Perhaps a man who threw a grenade at a bus, was sentenced to life, and has [subsequently] been released early and then re-arrested multiple times hasn’t really reformed. Likewise, perhaps Rajoub’s vehement opposition as head of the Palestinian Olympic Committee to a moment of silence for the Israeli athletes murdered during the 1972 Munich Olympics suggests that he really hasn’t embraced the spirit of peace or truly rejected terrorism.

The State Department has a long history of reaching out to terrorists. . . . It’s a strategy that [stretches from] Jimmy Carter’s desire to utilize Palestinian terrorists as intermediaries to win the release of American hostages in Iran to then-Senator John Kerry’s willingness to pass messages for Hamas to numerous officials who jumped on the Hizballah-is-legitimate bandwagon. In each case, U.S. diplomats legitimized terrorists but did not achieve their prime objective.

A far better strategy would be to utilize leverage—the U.S. government pays several hundred million dollars of it—in order to present the Palestinians with a stark choice: completely renounce and abandon terrorism as required by the Oslo Accords or lose everything. There should be no middle ground. What [Secretary of State] Rex Tillerson proposes to do, perhaps at the urging of the White House, . . . is nothing less than a quixotic effort and an insult to every American victim of terrorism.

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.