In February, Fouad Twal, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, declared that Israel was responsible for the murderous attacks on its own citizens. Meanwhile, as Lawrence Franklin notes, he has refrained from condemning the very real persecution faced by his coreligionists at the hands of the Palestinian Authority:

Twal . . . “forgets” the basic reason for the accelerating departure of Christians from Palestinian areas: intolerance of religious minorities, not the Israeli “occupation” of Arab territory.

Many [Palestinian Christians] have . . . [settled] in Israel, where they can practice their faith without restriction. Thousands of Catholics now work in Israel, where they enjoy complete religious liberty. . . .

The sad truth is that in the Palestinian territories, [by contrast], Christians are forced to live like dhimmi—second-class citizens who survive largely by the protection money they are required to pay to buy their daily safety. These barely-tolerated citizens exist only at the whim and pleasure of the ruling Muslim majority. Muslim Arab discrimination against non-Muslims includes economic and socially prejudicial behavior that makes it difficult or impossible for Christian Arabs to run a profitable business or for their families to be integrated fully into society. . . .

All we have to do is to observe how Christian holy sites are being demolished throughout the Middle East to realize that without Israel protecting Jerusalem’s and Bethlehem’s Christian holy places, there would, at some point, be no Christian holy places, period.

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.