According to a recent poll conducted by a respected Palestinian research group, 65 percent of Palestinians supported the April bombing of a bus in Jerusalem in which more than twenty Israelis were injured. This poll and other data, writes Daniel Polisar, suggest that last week’s shooting in Tel Aviv was equally popular:

Since August 2014, [pollsters] have on eight occasions asked Palestinians about their attitudes regarding “attacks against Israeli civilians within Israel,” and each time the majority expressed support. In the March 2016 poll, the last time this question was asked, 60 percent of Palestinians backed such attacks. . . .

[In addition, one] pattern has been consistent during the past decade and a half, with only a brief exception: high percentages of Palestinians have supported terror attacks on Israeli civilians in general, while even higher percentages have backed specific bombings and shootings that killed and wounded Israelis. . . .

[Therefore], would-be terrorists contemplating an attack can be reasonably confident that if they succeed in killing or injuring Israeli civilians, their actions will earn support and praise in their society—for themselves, their families, and the militant group to which they belong, whether or not they live to enjoy it personally. Indeed, they will be seen as heroes, not only in the communiques of Hamas but in the minds of rank-and-file Palestinians. As I have written previously, this may result from the society-wide veneration of martyrs during the weeks after they attain martyrdom (especially those who die while taking the battle to the Zionist enemy), or from the enthusiasm for striking Israelis in places of special significance—like Tel Aviv, the symbol of Jewish economic and military power, or Jerusalem, the epicenter of political rule and religious contention. . . .

Only if there is a sharp and durable decline in this deep-rooted support for such wanton violence and for those who perpetrate it can there be real hope that this kind of terrorism will become, as it ought to be, a relic of the past.

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.