Last week, an Israeli news network announced the finding of substantial evidence that the Palestinian Authority president had been recruited by Soviet intelligence during the 1980s and that his handler was none other than Mikhail Bogdanov—currently Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Middle East at a time when Russia is intervening to broker talks between Israel and the Palestinians. Jonathan Tobin considers the significance of these revelations:

If the PA leader were to confound observers and summon up the courage to embrace peace and recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter its borders, then nothing in his past would prevent him from obtaining extensive concessions from the current Israeli government or any possible successor. . . .

[T]he connection with the anti-Semitic Soviet leadership was always more than an alliance of convenience for men like [Yasir] Arafat and Abbas. . . .

[Likewise], the rejectionism of the Palestinians wasn’t merely a strategy but an expression of their identity. Their [leaders’ sense of] national purpose was and still is inextricably linked to their century-old war against the Zionists. If men like Abbas can’t rise above their sordid past and make peace, it is not just a matter of habit, but also a natural consequence of the political culture steeped in hate that they have helped create.

Being a former Soviet agent doesn’t prevent Abbas from making peace. But it does supply a partial explanation for why he refuses to do it.

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.