Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, married authors of best-selling novels, have bravely decided to alert the world to the supposed horrors of Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and east Jerusalem. To accomplish this, they are organizing a collection of essays by over twenty distinguished literary figures, all of whom have visited or will visit these territories and, Lawrence Haas writes, are presumably as naïve, self-righteous, and ignorant of Middle East realities as Chabon and Waldman:

The occupation is “the most grievous injustice I have ever seen in my life, . . . the worst thing I have ever seen, just purely in terms of injustice,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Jewish author Michael Chabon said after touring the West Bank city of Hebron in late April with his wife, . . . Ayelet Waldman. Perhaps Chabon’s led a sheltered life, for the occupation in Hebron and elsewhere in the West Bank hardly compares to humanitarian horror in North Korea, political suppression in China, Russia, and Cuba, and the lack of fundamental human rights across the Arab world.

Or perhaps it hasn’t occurred to Chabon, Waldman, and the other esteemed novelists who include Mario Vargas Llosa, Geraldine Brooks, and Dave Eggers . . . that they wouldn’t be allowed to investigate human rights in any of the aforementioned countries due to their autocratic rule. . . .

The book, Chabon and Waldman explained, “is not an analysis of the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It asks a simple question: What does occupation look like? What does it feel like to live under occupation?” So while raising consciousness to end the occupation, the book will offer no words about why it’s lasted a half-century, why Israel hasn’t succumbed to such pressure before, and what might happen if it did. . . .

Thus, this book will be another anti-Israeli temper tantrum that criticizes the occupation while offering nothing useful to end it.

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.