South Africa recently declined an opportunity to execute a warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against Omar al-Bashir, the genocidal president of Sudan. Eugene Kontorovich notes the many layers of hypocrisy at play here:

[F]ew other countries reflect the Palestinians’ warped view of international law as [does] South Africa. It has become one of the Jewish state’s most vocal critics, always couching its criticisms in language of law and rights, while embracing monsters like Robert Mugabe, the scourge-for-life of neighboring Zimbabwe. One cannot help being struck by the number of South Africans, especially jurists, at the forefront of international legal efforts against Israel (especially at the UN), including [those] seeking prosecutions at the ICC—Richard Goldstone, John Dugard, Navi Pillay, Desmond Tutu. . . .

So it’s easier for a crate of Jordan Valley dates to get served with process for war crimes in South Africa than the perpetrator of one of the world’s greatest genocides. . . .

Ironically, Bashir’s impunity may only push the ICC to take a harder line on Israel. One would think that genocide . . . would generate enough international consensus and pressure for its prosecution to get a fugitive arrested. . . . But apparently genocide is not enough. So the ICC prosecutor will cast about for a role that will make the court generally useful and appreciated by the international community, [by seeking] out the lowest common denominator of international demand for prosecution. And that’s not prosecution for genocide, but for houses for Jews in Jerusalem. Even the Palestinian Authority and South Africa can get behind that.

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.