Earlier this week, the U.S. announced that it had successfully negotiated a ceasefire among various warring parties in Syria. Noting that the agreement is riddled with problems, Liel Leibovitz cites Israel’s experience with a previous American-brokered ceasefire as reason for further skepticism:

[E]ven putting aside the weakness of the specific Syria ceasefire terms, the Obama administration’s credibility with ceasefires has been, and remains, badly damaged. The reason for this precedent can be described with one name: Hadar Goldin.

Early in the morning of August 1, 2014, nearly a month into Hamas’s war on Israel, a 72-hour U.S.- and UN-brokered ceasefire took hold. Two hours into that ceasefire, Palestinian terrorists exploited the lull in the fighting to emerge into southern Israel from a Gaza attack tunnel. They immediately murdered two Israeli soldiers and abducted Goldin, almost certainly killing him as well. . . .

Now, however, more than a year after Goldin’s death, Hamas still refuses to return his body for burial in Israel, a blatant violation of international law and basic human decency alike. It’s also an embarrassment to the Obama administration, which had backed the lull that the Palestinians used to slip into Israel. . . .

If the Obama administration wants to be taken seriously as a force for diplomacy and peaceful resolution in Syria and elsewhere, it must show that it is serious about accountability, and that the warring factions currently slouching their way to the negotiations table have reason to trust that America’s word is solid. Goldin’s case is a great place to start.

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.