Marking the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Yitzḥak Rabin, Shmuel Rosner argues that the Israeli prime minister’s legacy is often deeply misunderstood:

[T]o see Rabin’s legacy as peace with the Palestinians is to make a basic, and very common, mistake—a mistake based on the assumption that in Israel there are two rival ideologies: the “nationalistic camp” (the right wing) and the “peace camp” (the left wing).

It’s more accurate to turn that view on its head. The right wing is gradually becoming the camp that believes in peace—if by “peace” you mean Israelis and Palestinians living together. The left wing—really, the centrist camp plus some of the left—is the group that believes Israelis and Palestinians, or Israelis and Arabs, cannot live together in peace and hence must broker some kind of political separation. This should properly be called the nationalist view. This is the true Rabin legacy, and it is thriving.

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.