The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), a body hardly known for fairness toward Israel—or for its embrace of human rights—has named Penny Green, a professor of “law and globalization” at a London university, as its “special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories.” Tim Marshall comments:

[Green] supports the total boycott of Israel, wants Hamas de-listed as a terrorist organization, and has wondered why the British and Americans have not begun “bombing Israel for its massacres.”

So far, so routine in the extremist mainstream. To her credit, Green, unlike so many “human-rights activists,” stands up against abuses around the world and not just in one small part of it. She does, however, display an unhealthy obsession with the same place that others obsess over: Israel.

She is entitled to her opinion. However, surely anyone, even someone supporting these views, might understand that holding them disqualifies you from impartially judging the behavior of one of many parties involved in the situation. . . . The UNHCR’s own rules state that when selecting a candidate [for this job], impartiality and objectivity are of “paramount importance.”

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.