King Abdullah of Jordan recently proposed that video cameras be installed on the Temple Mount, an idea welcomed by the Israeli government. Palestinian officials, however, objected strenuously. Khaled Abu Toameh explains why:

[T]he Palestinian Authority and the Islamic Movement in Israel have hired scores of Muslim men and women to harass the Jewish visitors and the police officers escorting them. . . . The installation of surveillance cameras at the site will expose the aggressive behavior of [these “defenders of the Temple Mount”], and show the world who is really “desecrating” the Islamic holy sites and turning them into a base for assaulting and abusing Jewish visitors and policemen.

The cameras are also likely to refute the claim that Jews are “violently invading” the al-Aqsa mosque and holding prayers at the Temple Mount. The PA, Hamas, and the Islamic Movement have long been describing the Jewish visits as “provocative and violent incursions” into the al-Aqsa mosque. But now the cameras will show that Jews do not enter al-Aqsa, as Palestinians have been claiming.

Another reason the Palestinians are opposed to King Abdullah’s idea is their fear that the cameras would expose that Palestinians have been smuggling stones, firebombs, and pipe bombs into the al-Aqsa mosque for the past two years.

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.