A delegation of Saudi academics, businessmen, and other notables, led by a retired general, came to Jerusalem last week, where they met with Knesset members as well as with Dore Gold, Israel’s top diplomat. Aaron David Miller comments on the visit’s significance:

No current Saudi officials were included, but the visit could not have happened without high-level governemnt approval. This is not necessarily a harbinger of strengthening ties between Saudi Arabia and Israel. But it indicates how Saudi Arabia and the region are changing. . . .

[N]on-governmental meetings between Israelis and Saudis in academic and policy forums are fairly common. . . . But publicly announced meetings in Jerusalem at the King David hotel are different. The nominal purpose was discussion of the 2002 [Saudi peace] initiative. . . . It stands out that the Saudis did not call for Israel’s blanket acceptance of the 2002 initiative [as they have previously done]. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken about his willingness to accept the Saudi plan—with modifications. . . .

A decade ago, sending a Saudi delegation to Israel without some significant quid pro quo or breakthrough in the peace process would have been unimaginable. . . . [But] testing the waters is one thing; to make major and unmatched concessions on a matter that still resonates broadly and deeply amid the Arab world’s divides and dysfunction would be quite another. The Saudis may be less hostile to Israel, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t require big concessions as the price of getting closer.

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.