Dan Ephron’s Killing a King may provide a readable and accurate account of the events leading up to Yitzḥak Rabin’s assassination, writes Seth Mandel, but these merits are outweighed by the author’s “naked ideological agenda.” This causes him to miss the profound realignment in Israeli politics that is Rabin’s real legacy:

The two camps have, [in effect], switched sides. Israel’s left bitterly credits Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir, with victory; the two-state solution is dead, they say, and its death throes began that night in 1995. Meanwhile, many of the leaders on Israel’s right, including its past two prime ministers, now essentially express their agreement with the goal of Oslo. The fulfillment of Rabin’s peace process, they say, will be necessary in the long term to secure a viable future for the Jewish state. . . .

All the spin in the world can’t change the fact that the current Likud prime minister stands today to the left of Yitzḥak Rabin in 1995. Yigal Amir received the ultimate punishment for his hubris: his monstrous act actually advanced the peace process inside Israel. [But] nothing anyone can do seems able to advance the process for the Palestinians, who want none of it.

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.