Long a forum for despotic and ruthless regimes to criticize the Jewish state, the UN Human Rights Council has now commissioned an investigation into corporations doing business in Jewish areas of the West Bank and is set to release a list of such companies. The editors of the New York Post comment:

The Human Rights Council (HRC) believes companies doing business in the settlements are somehow [committing] a human-rights violation. Never mind that many of these firms provide jobs for Palestinians in the area and that the blacklist could cost many of them meaningful work. Or that the companies provide needed goods and services to anyone, no matter their background or where they live.

Ignore, too, the fact that the panel . . . has never voiced any human-rights concerns about firms in “occupied territory” elsewhere in the world, even where ethnic cleansing has taken place. And that numerous legal opinions and rulings [permit] such practices, with some citing language in the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The World Bank itself has lent billions to companies in occupied territories around the world. Heck, even the United Nations’ own legal adviser, in a 2002 memo on Western Sahara, concluded that such a practice raised no human-rights concerns.

But then, the move by the HRC isn’t really about fighting human-rights abuses (or, for that matter, making rational and consistent policy of any kind). It’s about trying to hurt Israel in any way possible and gin up opposition toward it. . . . Meanwhile, the council and [its director’s] office get hundreds of millions of dollars every year, much of it from the United States. Surely there are better uses for that money.

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.