Last week, UNESCO passed a resolution condemning Israel for fictive violations of the Muslim holy places on the Temple Mount, without making any mention of the fact that they are located on an ancient Jewish sacred site. Charles Krauthammer comments:

[The resolution] refers to and treats [the Temple Mount] as an exclusively Muslim site, a deliberate attempt to eradicate its connection—let alone its centrality—to the Jewish people and Jewish history.

This Orwellian absurdity, part of a larger effort to deny the Jewish connection to their ancestral homeland, is an insult not just to Judaism but to Christianity. It makes a mockery of the Gospels, which chronicle the story of a Galilean Jew whose life and ministry unfolded throughout the Holy Land, most especially in Jerusalem and the Temple. If this is nothing but a Muslim site, what happens to the very foundation of Christianity, which occurred 600 years before Islam even came into being?

But while such an attack is merely symbolic, Krauthammer notes that the UN could do much more serious damage should President Obama, as has been rumored, decide to support a Security Council resolution declaring a Palestinian state in the areas Israel seized from Egypt and Jordan in 1967:

There is a reason such a move has been resisted by eight previous U.S. administrations: it overthrows the central premise of Middle East peacemaking—land for peace. . . . Land for peace would be replaced by land for nothing. Endorsing in advance a Palestinian state and what would essentially be a full Israeli withdrawal removes the Palestinian incentive to negotiate and strips Israel of territorial bargaining chips of the kind it used, for example, to achieve peace with Egypt.

The result would be not just perpetual war but incalculable damage to Israel. . . . [C]onsider but one example: [Israel] would now be open to the absurd judicial charge that [its] possession of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem constitutes a criminal occupation of another country. Israel would be hauled endlessly into courts (both national and international) to face sanctions, boycotts (now under color of law), and arrest of its leaders.

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.