Among Palestinians, popular songs with titles like “Stab, Stab” or “Run Over, Run Over the Settler” are hits, and social media are inundated with anti-Semitic images and lionizations of terrorism. Meanwhile, UNESCO has passed a resolution condemning imagined Israeli aggression while denying any Jewish connection to Jewish holy sites. Jonathan Tobin writes:

In the eyes of those making claims on Jewish holy places at the United Nations as well as the composers of Palestinian snuff songs, or those taking up knives, guns, and firebombs to slaughter, the conflict is a zero-sum game. Their goal is the same as that of Palestinian nationalists in the time of the mufti of Jerusalem: reverse the history of the last century and end the rebirth of Jewish sovereignty over any part of the country. Just as [Mahmoud] Abbas won’t accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn, the people hearing his lies about the Temple Mount who go out to murder aren’t killing for the sake of a better border.

Withdrawals from territory or even concessions in Jerusalem won’t satisfy this blood lust any more than a withdrawal of every settler, soldier, and settlement from Gaza prevented it from being turned into a terrorist state run by Hamas. The reality of this culture of hate isn’t easy to accept for those who prefer to believe Abbas really is a man of peace and that a two-state solution is viable. But it remains the real obstacle to peace.

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.