During a recent official trip to Jordan, the secretary of state met with King Abdullah as well as Mahmoud Abbas—reportedly to discuss both the fight against Islamic State and “continued tensions between Israel and the Palestinians.” On the latter score, writes Khaled Abu Toameh, we needn’t expect results:

[The word] “tensions” implies two sides engaged in some kind of dispute that has aggravated a situation and strained relations between them, instead of what it really is: Palestinians openly trying to supplant Israel. . . . No doubt, we will witness more pressure on Israel to make concessions that will supposedly ease the “tensions.”

It is a Palestinian commonplace that the two previous uprisings—in 1987 and 2000—brought major achievements to the Palestinians. The first intifada led to Israel’s recognition of the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians,” a move that was followed by the signing of the Oslo Accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority. The second intifada, [many] Palestinians argue, led to Israel’s full withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005. . . .

Thus far, not a word has been uttered by either [Abbas or Abdullah] that could be even vaguely interpreted by their people as “stop killing Israelis.” . . . Here is a novel idea: Kerry could put pressure on the Palestinian and Jordanian leadership to cease anti-Israeli incitement and indoctrination. Now that would be pressure well applied. And it does not even require funding.

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.