After the president spoke at the Israeli statesman’s funeral last week, the White House issued a press release with the text of his remarks—and then, shortly thereafter, a correction. In the revised version, the location of the speech is given as “Jerusalem” instead of “Jerusalem, Israel.” Elliott Abrams comments:

The absurdity of this move is striking. The ceremony was at Mount Herzl, the Jerusalem cemetery where many of Israel’s greatest figures are buried: Theodor Herzl himself, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, Golda Meir, Yitzḥak Rabin, and innumerable military heroes.

It lies in western Jerusalem, near Yad Vashem and Jerusalem Forest—a place Palestinians do not even claim when they claim a share of Jerusalem. Only those who seek to destroy Israel think this place will ever be anything but a part of the Jewish state. U.S. policy is that Jerusalem is a final-status issue, so we have our embassy in Tel Aviv. But there is no dispute about west Jerusalem, where the Knesset, the prime minister’s office, the Supreme Court, the National Library, and Yad Vashem—and Mount Herzl—all lie.

One wonders if President Obama, speaking about the meaning of Peres’s life for Israel, actually thought as he spoke those words at the gravesite that he was not standing in Israel, and that Shimon Peres was not being buried in Israel. I doubt it. Which suggests, again, how foolish the current and longstanding American policy really is.

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.