Time and again, the argument is heard that the Palestinians lived in the land of Israel for many centuries as a homogeneous people—until the advent of Zionism, after which they were subject to expulsions, oppression, and occupation. But, notes Yoram Ettinger, in the pre-state era the Arab and Muslim population was in fact highly heterogeneous, and composed to a large degree of immigrants and their descendants:

[For instance], between 1880 and 1919, Haifa’s Arab population surged from 6,000 to 80,000, mostly due to migrant workers. The eruption of World War II accelerated the demand for Arab manpower by the British Mandate’s military and civilian authorities. Moreover, Arab migrant workers were imported by the Ottoman empire, and then by the British administration, to work in major civilian and military infrastructure projects. Legal and illegal Arab migrants were also attracted by economic growth, which was generated by the Jewish community beginning in 1882.

According to a 1937 report by the British Peel Commission, from “1922 through 1931, the increase of Arab population in the mixed-towns of Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem was 86 percent, 62 percent, and 37 percent respectively, while in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only 7 percent, [with] a decrease of 2 percent in Gaza.”

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.