Featuring the glorification of martyrdom, maps from which Israel is missing, and promises of hellfire for infidels, the textbooks issued by the Palestinian Authority cannot be said to be preparing a generation of young Palestinians for peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state. Dov Lieber writes:

In the Palestinian history books for grades ten through twelve, there are full chapters dedicated to World War II but no mention of the Holocaust. . . . Islamic-studies textbooks . . . celebrate martyrdom, including a fourth-grade textbook that invites the children to write about a Palestinian martyr of their choice. . . . The issue of paradise and the division between believers (Muslims) and nonbelievers permeate the textbooks. . . .

The erasure of Israel’s physical existence begins early, with cartoons in first-grade textbooks showing stores in Arab Palestine—among them a pharmacy in Safed, a supermarket in Haifa, and a candy store in Beersheba. All three cities were under Israeli control long before 1967.

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.