This Friday, some twenty diplomats—including representatives of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab League, but not of Israel—will arrive in Paris for a one-day conference on how to revive efforts to create a Palestinian state. The initiative, writes Jeff Robbins, is bound to fail—just like those that preceded it:

The French have said that their purpose is “saving the two-state solution” and “bringing the parties back to the negotiating table.” This is a head-scratcher, since the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected the two-state solution and have refused to negotiate with Israel for many years now, turning down its request for negotiations as recently as last week. It is hard to believe that anyone is fooled at this point by the Palestinians’ song-and-dance, since all they have done [for decades] is to say “no” to the very independent state they say they want—the independent state that would end the occupation that they declare with a straight face is the cause of the conflict. . . .

[Yet in] Paris this week the charade proceeds as before. The Palestinians’ rejection of the very two-state solution they profess to seek will continue. Their rejectionism will be excused [and] the rejectionists coddled. Israel will be lambasted, as always. The end of conflict that ought to be attainable if it were actually desired will remain unattained.

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.