Last week the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert began his prison sentence, having been convicted of corruption after a years-long legal battle. Isi Leibler, who first befriended Olmert in the 1980s, reflects on the Israeli politician’s migration from the far right to the left and his fall from grace, focusing on a crucial moment in 2005:

In a shocking display of crude political opportunism, the right-wing Likud leader with a Revisionist background became, virtually overnight, Prime Minister Sharon’s most aggressive and effective proponent of the disastrous unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. He was brutal and even cruel in the mocking of his former friends and allies and trivialized the forcible eviction of the Gush Katif settlements. At that stage, I became one of his most fervent critics.

His subsequent trials, which culminated in his conviction and a six-year sentence reduced to 19 months—which pending another case still to be determined could be extended to 27 months—represent a shameful reflection of the abysmally low level of personal morality to which some Israeli politicians have descended. . . . On the positive side, at least it demonstrates that in Israel, nobody is above the rule of law.

Without diminishing his moral corruption, my feeling is that Olmert’s devastating role in the second Lebanon war and his groveling to the Palestinians will have a far greater negative long-term impact on Israel than the activities for which he was sentenced to jail.

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.