Addressing the United Nations last month, Barack Obama declared that “Israel cannot permanently occupy Palestinian land,” presumably referring to the West Bank. This statement, argues Moshe Arens, is built on a number of faulty assumptions about both the problem at hand and its possible solution:

Was it Palestinian land that Jordan annexed after the conclusion of the armistice with Israel? Nobody made that claim at the time, or during the following eighteen years when Jordan held that area. Did it suddenly become Palestinian land only after Jordan joined Egypt and Syria in their war against Israel in 1967 and was forced to withdraw from the area? Or was it Palestinian land all along, [but] the Palestinian claim was left in abeyance as long as Jordan ruled the area and sprang to life only after the Jordanian army was defeated? . . .

[Be that is it may], much of the United States—California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Texas—is territory captured during the Mexican-American war of 1846-48. . . . [Likewise], President Obama surely knows that his birthplace of Hawaii, once an independent nation, had been taken over by the United States in an 1893 coup, becoming the 50th state more than 60 years later in 1959. So who is the “occupier”? Can “occupation” lead in time to a peaceful accommodation as it did in California and Hawaii?

[By contrast], Obama himself was the commander in chief of an occupying army when he inherited the American occupation in Iraq. He decided to pull out and damn the consequences. The victims of the American exit from Iraq were the people of Iraq and the rest of the region, not the American people.

Some would suggest that Israel follow the same path. Get out of the West Bank, end the “occupation,” and damn the consequences. But Israel cannot exit the region like America; Israel is here to stay. And the first victims of an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would be the Israeli people, who could expect rockets to rain down on their cities.

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.