Israel’s surprising and decisive victory in 1967, writes Hussein Ibish, was traumatic for Arabs across the Middle East, with lasting effects:

It’s difficult for Westerners to grasp the Arab certainty of victory [in 1967]. Across the Middle East, most people looked at the raw numbers of soldiers and materials and drew simplistic and erroneous conclusions about the outcome. Defeat was unimaginable to all but a few. The worst that most Arabs could imagine was a painful, drawn-out struggle, for which they thought they were prepared.

Recognizing these facile assumptions is indispensable to comprehending the largely still-unresolved trauma of the scope, totality, and speed of the defeat in 1967, [which] overturned Arab perceptions of external reality. . . .

From the 1940s until 1967, as many countries in the region won independence from colonizers, the essential Arab attitude was one of optimism, determination, international engagement, and hope. Afterward, the biggest single missing element, in many cases still unrecovered, is self-confidence. The collective deflation is hard to communicate. But since then, most of the Arab world has continually lacked a fundamental belief in itself. This collective deflation has been, and to some extent remains, a significant obstacle to peace, because confidence is essential to making concessions.

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.