Israeli diplomats and spokesmen, writes Evelyn Gordon, compromise efforts at effective diplomacy by routinely (if inadvertently) arguing the cause of the Palestinians:

Official Israeli spokesmen . . . talk constantly about the Palestinians’ “right” to establish a state in these lands, while talking only sporadically about Israel’s own legal and historical rights there. And, needless to say, Palestinians don’t return the favor: they talk constantly about their own rights and never about Israel’s rights. . . .

Thus for most of world, deciding who really owns the land becomes a no-brainer: the Palestinian claim looks much stronger. After all, both sides agree unequivocally that the Palestinians have rights there, so that must be true. In contrast, Israel asserts its own claims only half-heartedly, while Palestinians deny them outright; hence Israel’s claims seem dubious. . . .

Israel has one huge advantage . . . : all the claims it can and should be making against the Palestinians are true, whereas Palestinian claims against Israel are frequently egregious lies. But the Palestinians tell their lies consistently and wholeheartedly, never offering any support for Israel’s truths, whereas Israel tells its truths sporadically and half-heartedly, while offering frequent support to Palestinian lies. And as long as that continues, the lies will be victorious.

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.