In a recently decided case, the Supreme Court ruled that a Jerusalem-born U.S. citizen’s passport could not indicate “Israel” as his birthplace. Avi Bell notes that the citizen in question was born in west Jerusalem—that is, in the part of the city under Israeli control since 1948:

The Obama administration has explained that refusing to recognize Israeli sovereignty in any part of Jerusalem is necessary to avoid interference with the “peace process.” Jerusalem, says the White House, must be dealt with solely in negotiations between the parties. But this justification falls apart upon the slightest examination.

The current PLO territorial demands, repeated often and in every forum imaginable, are for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and “east Jerusalem.” No senior PLO figure has demanded in recent years that Israel also withdraw from “west Jerusalem.” . . .

The U.S. position on Jerusalem also contradicts the Obama White House’s own . . . stance on the peace process. The White House has endorsed a Palestinian demand that the 1948-1967 ceasefire line that separated sovereign Israeli territory from the Jordanian-occupied West Bank and “east Jerusalem” should serve as the presumptive border of a new Palestinian state in all negotiations. . . . But when it comes to Israel and Jerusalem, says the White House, the ceasefire line should be forgotten and presumptive Israeli sovereignty should be erased.

Historically, the U.S. position on Jerusalem developed without any connection to the Israel-PLO peace negotiations that began in 1993. The U.S. never recognized Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, even in 1948, when Israel’s war of independence left parts of Jerusalem in Israeli hands. . . . As time has passed, U.S. hostility on Jerusalem has remained constant, while the excuses for the hostility have changed.

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.