To wrap up his four-year term as secretary of state—whose highlights include negotiating the disastrous Iran deal, brokering a series of failed ceasefires in Syria, and normalizing relations with Cuba for nothing in return—John Kerry yesterday took a much-publicized swipe at the Jewish state. Calling his speech “a long, meandering . . . exclamation point on a failed foreign policy,” the editors of National Review indict Kerry for arrogance, ignorance, and spitefulness:

[I]n the face of Palestinian violence and Palestinian dysfunction, the Obama administration vents its spleen at Israel, the only party that has proved its willingness to take meaningful risks for peace. Moreover, Kerry’s reasoning is nonsensical even in its own terms. In his speech, he took specific aim at recent settlement activity that he claims makes a two-state solution less viable. Yet the resolution the United States allowed to pass the UN Security Council declares all settlement activity unlawful, even those “settlements”—like the suburbs of Israel’s capital, Jerusalem—that would doubtless become part of Israel under any meaningful peace agreement.

The Obama administration was angry at far-flung settlements, so it cast Jewish control of the Western Wall into doubt? That makes no sense, except as an exercise in pure spite.

Kerry seemed to grow angry when he said that the status quo is “leading toward one state, or perpetual occupation,” but the status quo that he decries is an artifact of ongoing Palestinian terror campaigns, not Israeli settlements. Jews have just as much right to live in the disputed territories as members of any other ethnic group, and Kerry’s condemnation of all Israeli “settlements” echoes Palestinian desires to force Jews to leave the West Bank. . . .

The Obama administration loves to boast of its “values,” and today’s speech was no exception. Yet the “values” advanced in the administration’s recent actions are abhorrent. It has perverted international law, rewarded Palestinian violence, endorsed ethnic cleansing, and applied UN-created double standards that leave Israel as the most persecuted and most condemned state in UN history. . . .

The Obama administration is leaving office as it entered, arrogant and willfully ignorant, refusing to see the plain truth of the Middle East—that Israel cannot make peace with “partners” that long for its death.

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.