Earlier this week, Turkey commemorated the deaths of the “martyrs” who were killed by the IDF five years ago during an attempt to break the blockade of Gaza. Meanwhile, the Turkish government has delivered less than 1 percent of the funds it pledged last year for the reconstruction of Gaza. Burak Bekdil writes:

By discreetly encouraging the flotilla, and possibly calculating its aftermath, the Turkish government aimed at two things: boosting then-prime minister (now president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s popularity on the Arab street and consolidating his votes among Turkey’s conservative masses. The first aim has dramatically failed, except in the Palestinian territories and Qatar; but the second has been achieved. . . .

One day, perhaps, the Palestinians will understand that their “cause” is, for their Turkish brothers, merely an ideological feel-good motive and an instrument in a quest . . . to consolidate power both at home and in the Arab world. . . . Underneath its “pro-Palestinian” mindset, Turkish solidarity with the Palestinians is less related to the Palestinian cause and more to [Turkish] Islamists’ devotion to the dream of conquest.

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.