With turmoil and bloodshed gripping the Middle East, there are signs that Arab public opinion is beginning to reject the primacy of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. To Evelyn Gordon, this development could have important consequences:

[T]he Arab and Islamic world, which for years was at the forefront of pushing the notion that the Palestinian issue is the world’s number-one problem, is starting to get fed up with the Palestinians’ utter self-absorption at a time when so many Arabs and Muslims are suffering far worse. . . .

The Palestinian cause didn’t become a Western obsession by mere chance; it became a Western obsession in large part because the Arab and Islamic world spent decades relentlessly telling Westerners that this was the Middle East’s biggest problem. By now, this view has become entrenched dogma in the West, and it clearly won’t lose that position overnight. But as Arab and Islamic countries start downgrading the importance of the Palestinian issue, this will eventually have an impact on the West as well. . . .

In arguing that the Israel-Palestinian status quo is unsustainable, both the Israeli left and its American Jewish counterpart rely heavily on fears that the ongoing conflict is eroding Western support for Israel, and therefore that time is on the Palestinians’ side. But given the West’s growing and unhappy acquaintance with radical Islam, Israel’s improving status in other parts of the world, and the nascent change in Arab attitudes toward the Palestinian issue, it’s looking far more likely that time is on Israel’s side.

In the long run, these developments could also help solve the Israel-Palestinian conflict by convincing Palestinians that Israel isn’t likely to disappear, so negotiating a reasonable peace deal is their best option. But whether or not that ever happens, there’s no reason for Israel to feel pressured to make hasty concessions for fear of diplomatic isolation. . . . Israel can afford to wait.

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.