Last year, as part of its effort to seek recognition from international bodies, the Palestinian Authority signed two UN “covenants” that include a commitment to protecting freedom of religion. Nevertheless, as Jessica Owen Payne writes, the PA continues to persecute its Christians,:

[R]esidents of the West Bank are subject to hard labor for life for selling land to an “enemy state or one of its subjects.” . . . Most Palestinians take this to mean that they are forbidden to sell property to any non-Muslim. . . . Palestinian marriages are invalid if they are made between a Muslim woman and a non-Muslim man; in the West Bank, that invalidity extends to marriages between a Muslim man and a Jewish or Christian woman. In addition, mothers are able to gain custody of their children if, and only if, they are not apostates from Islam. . . .

Muslims—or converts [to Islam]—in the [Palestinian] territories have full rights to citizenship, but the same cannot be said of those who choose to leave Islam. Although the letter of Palestinian law allows for the adoption or rejection of Islam, converts to another religion end up losing all social and religious protection and can face the loss of property, the nullification of marriage, and, ultimately, . . . the death penalty. In addition, those who identify as secular or atheistic often hide their non-belief under a religious façade to avoid arrest.

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.