“Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us” and “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.” Harvey Rachlin reports that, after much searching, he has found no solid evidence that Golda Meir made either of these statements, though variations of both are regularly attributed to her:

In investigating the veracity of a historical occurrence or quote, one also wants to consider whether the event or statement in question is consistent with the personality, habits, or disposition of the public figure connected to it. . . . [The Egyptian president Gamal Abdel] Nasser was an avowed enemy of Israel who desired, along with Egypt’s Arab neighbors, to destroy the country. With so much Jewish blood having been spilled to preserve the nation’s very existence, would the iron-willed and resolute Meir really have said something that has such an abject ring of supplication and liberal political correctness to it?

In the chapter in her autobiography on the Yom Kippur War, Meir wrote: “For years we not only had seen our sons killed but had tolerated a situation so grotesque that it is almost unbelievable: the only time that Arab states were prepared to recognize the state of Israel was when they had attacked it in order to wipe it out.”

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.