Last month, the Israeli government outlawed the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, which has played a major role in inciting the ongoing wave of terror attacks. It played a similar role in the outbreak of Israeli-Arab riots in 2000 and in the second intifada more generally. Raffa Abu Tareef gives a history of the organization, and explains its pernicious impact:

The Northern Branch . . . seeks to reduce Muslim participation in the Israeli political system to the minimum necessary to serve the interests of the Muslim community, and reduce the community’s dependence on state institutions. Its guiding principle is that the entirety of Israel is an “Islamic waqf,” sacred Muslim property. Even though both [the Northern Branch and the somewhat less extreme Southern Branch] of the Islamic Movement have condemned terrorism in the past, emphasizing that their activities are conducted within the law, the Northern Branch often addresses the issue in vague and amorphous terms, especially in regard to the activities of Palestinian organizations. . . .

Because the Islamic Movement took its ideology from the world of Islamic concepts and symbols, it has the potential for wide popular support. [I]t . . . grew stronger throughout the 1990s. . . . Between the split from the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in 1996 and the outbreak of the 2000 riots, the leaders of the Northern Branch exploited every opportunity to [convince] the Arab public that their holy places on the Temple Mount were in immediate danger and that they must rise up to defend them.

That incitement continues to this day.

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.