Last week, Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the Palestinian demand that a future Palestinian state be free of Jews as a call for “ethnic cleansing,” thereby causing a stir. Examining similar situations from the present and recent past, Eugene Kontorovich notes that this demand, whatever name one gives to it, is entirely without precedent:

When pressed, defenders of the Palestinian position characterize the demand as “no settlers” rather than the uglier-sounding “no Jews.” [This description] is hard to take at face value, as the Palestinians have never objected to Israeli Arabs settling across the Green Line, as they have in significant numbers. . . .

There is simply no support in international practice for the expulsion of settlers from occupied territories. In the many situations involving settlers around the world, the international community has never supported expulsion, and consistently backed plans allowing the settlers to remain in a new state. . . .

This is not because these settlers are beloved by the surrounding population. The opposite is true. In the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, representatives of the latter tried to raise the possibility of expelling the nearly one-million Vietnamese settlers. Their arguments were familiar: the settlers remind them of the occupation, rekindle ancient hatreds, and destabilize the peace. Yet the Cambodian demand for the mass removal of ethnic Vietnamese was rejected outright by diplomats.

Furthermore, argues Kontorovich, Israeli settlers have a claim to legitimacy absent in comparable cases:

The only reason [Jews living in the West Bank are] “settlers” was the Jordanian expulsion of 1949, and their subsequent nineteen-year enforcement of a Jew-free territory. International-law scholars like to say that Israel, as an occupying power, must maintain the prior status quo. Even assuming that is true, pointing out that the status quo was itself a result of recent, complete to-the-last Jew ethnic cleansing should hardly be bad form.

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.