As part of Mahmoud Abbas’s overall strategy of using international institutions to wage diplomatic warfare on Israel, 66 members of the European parliament, backed up by a detailed report from Human-Rights Watch (HRW), are petitioning the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA) to expel Israeli semi-professional soccer leagues located in the West Bank. Their letter further suggests the expulsion of Israel itself from the league. Eugene Kontorovich comments:

The legal arguments raised in these documents are entirely contrived. They contradict longstanding FIFA practice and create a double standard for Israel. . . .

[T]he HRW report . . . asserts that the local soccer leagues (all quite small-time) are “making the settlements more sustainable, thus propping up” the system. Most of the communities in question are just a few kilometers from the 1949 Jordanian-Israeli armistice line and would remain in Israel in all the major two-state proposals; their residents typically commute to work in bigger nearby cities. It is laughable to think anyone would leave [these communities] if the football league moved a few kilometers down the road. In any case, contrary to HRW’s claims, there is simply no support in international law for prohibiting business in occupied territories, as British and French courts have recently affirmed. . . .

[But] those campaigning against Israel rely principally on a lawyerly claim about FIFA’s rules: the clubs “clearly violate FIFA’s statutes, according to which clubs from one member association cannot play on the territory of another member association without its and FIFA’s consent.”

Curiously, the parliament members and the think tanks that support them do not cite any statutes saying this. And that is because the statutes specifically do not say that. . . . Rather, they deal with de-facto control. This is hardly surprising as FIFA is not a political body and would hardly be expected to, or want to, be forced to decide contentious territorial questions between members.

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.