A recent lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine described life in Shuafat, a slum located within the borders of Jerusalem but outside the security barrier that, over the past decade, has greatly reduced the ability of terrorists to strike Israel. Shuafat’s poverty stems in part from its being outside the jurisdiction of both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority and in part from its being administered by the United Nations, whose mandate is to perpetuate the suffering of its Palestinian residents. Jonathan Tobin writes:

People are in Shuafat and every other Palestinian refugee camp because the Arab world and its leaders and organizations have kept them there for some 68 years. In the years that followed World War II, . . . the United Nations set up two separate refugee agencies: one—UNRWA—that was solely devoted to the Palestinians and one for [the millions of other refugees] in the world. The latter was successful in caring for and finding new homes for its charges. UNRWA kept the Palestinians in the camps, and the Arab nations and Palestinian groups have ensured that this remains the case up until the present day. The sole purpose of keeping the refugees and their descendants—who now number in the millions—in place was to use them as a weapon against Israel. They sit in camps like Shuafat still being told that someday they will return to their old places of residence when Israel ceases to be a Jewish state.

That the camps have become awful slums is a function of the refusal of the world body, or the Arab world, to contemplate any solution other than the so-called “right of return,” which would mean the destruction of Israel. That they are not only poverty-stricken but hotbeds of anti-Israel extremism and terror is hardly surprising. In Shuafat’s case, the residents’ plight was worsened by the terrorist war of attrition launched by Yasir Arafat, which forced Israel to erect a barrier that succeeded in stopping the suicide bombings. . . .

Israel may be accused of lacking sympathy for the refugees, but it lacks the power to improve conditions in Shuafat or other camps in the West Bank, let alone Hamas-run Gaza. The responsibility belongs solely to UNRWA and the Palestinian leadership, both of which remain content to continue the same cynical policies. . . . When biased media ignore this fact, the biggest losers are the refugees.

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.