Isaac Herzog, leader of Israel’s Labor party, recently declared in an interview that he sees the creation of a Palestinian state as desirable in the long run but impossible under current conditions. Were he to become prime minister, Herzog explained, he would focus on short-term measures to improve Israeli security and Palestinian quality of life. Jonathan Tobin notes the implications of this dramatic shift, especially for U.S.-Israeli relations:

Unlike Americans who simply ignore any evidence about the conflict that doesn’t validate their preexisting assumptions, Israelis are aware that their so-called peace partners are both inciting and applauding the most gruesome acts of terrorism. Moreover, they have noticed that Palestinians don’t seem to draw any distinction between Jews sitting in a Tel Aviv café and those living in a West Bank settlement. For them, all are ripe targets for murder, and those who commit such atrocities are considered heroes.

This is an important point American Jewish left-wingers who pose as experts about Israel steadfastly refuse to acknowledge. It also illustrates how pointless the Obama administration’s efforts to pressure Israel have been. . . . No one should expect these facts to influence Israel’s critics. But they ought to have some impact on those vying for the presidency in both parties. The next president’s task will be to repair the “daylight” damage Obama has done. But he or she should also be willing to tell the world that there will be no more talk of two states until the Palestinians give up their dreams of Israel’s destruction and cease terrorism.

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.