Palestinian leaders have assiduously spread rumors that Israel is planning to change current regulations that allow Muslims but not Jews to pray on the Temple Mount. Without any basis in reality, the rumors have served as a pretext for the ongoing wave of terror. Actually, Hillel Frisch writes, there are compelling reasons why Israel should change its policies:

[T]he status quo on the Temple Mount . . . must change on both strategic and moral grounds. Strategically, the status quo must change because the demand that Jews (and Christians as well) be given the right to pray on the Temple Mount interlocks with Israel’s justifiable demand that the Palestinians accept Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Most Palestinians oppose both Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount and recognition of Israel as a Jewish state for the same . . . reason. In their view, Jews can be no more than . . . a protected but subordinate religious minority under [Muslim rule], and not a sovereign people. . . .

Only if the Palestinians accept the right of parity and religious freedom on the Mount in Jerusalem, and recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people will the war of independence that Israel fought in 1948 be truly over. . . .

There is another reason why the status quo on the Temple Mount should change. It starts with the realization that Israel is facing a situation of protracted conflict with the Palestinians; a conflict that will have to be managed for the long term. In this situation, it is critically important that the Palestinians realize that Israel’s managing of the conflict does not necessarily mean keeping the status quo. After all, if the Palestinians have nothing to lose from a protracted conflict, why should they move to moderate their positions?

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.