An Israeli television program reported earlier this week that two prominent Jewish Israeli left-wing activists had been involved in entrapping Palestinians trying to sell land to Israelis and then handing them over to the Palestinian Authority—which generally punishes this “crime” with death. Contrasting the defensive reaction to these revelations from leaders of the Israeli left to the widespread and firm condemnations from the Israeli right following an attack on a Palestinian family last summer, Liel Leibovitz writes:

Rather than decrying the act of delivering innocents to their tormentors and collaborating with a regime routinely counted among the world’s most repressive, Gideon Levy—the Grand Old Man of the Israeli left—blamed the messenger, insisting that [the television show that broke the story] was airing right-wing propaganda in an effort to curry favor with the brownshirts in the government and save itself from imminent censorship. “This,” Levy wrote in his typically overheated style, “is what it feels like when the ground is burning underneath your feet.” . . . And the author A. B. Yehoshua, no stranger to idiotic pronouncements, said that if the Palestinian Authority chose to execute its own citizens for selling land to Jews, it was fully within its rights to do so. . . .

[T]his collective refusal to move away from the party line and condemn what so obviously needs condemning is evidence of a real and deep crisis in the Israeli left. . . . [After its post-Oslo] prayers for peaceful coexistence were met with Palestinian violence, and most of its voters . . . decamped for other, more sober camps, the Israeli left, shell-shocked, had two choices: readjust their analysis of reality or devolve into dogma. Catastrophically, it chose the latter. . . . If the left truly wants to save Israeli democracy from descending into darkness, it should begin by saving itself.

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.