In 2016, fewer rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza than in any year since the Israeli withdrawal; the last several months of that year also saw a decline in lone-wolf terror attacks. Evelyn Gordon writes that these welcome developments were traceable to the deterrent effect of the 2014 war, the failures of terror to elicit Israeli concessions, and international condemnations of Palestinian incitement. But now, with the UN Security Council’s anti-settlement resolution, and the U.S. secretary of state’s lengthy speech indicting Israel, the situation has changed:

[By December, the Palestinian Authority] had begun ratcheting its anti-Israel incitement ever so slightly downward. But then came the UN resolution, followed by John Kerry’s speech on the peace process five days later, and the PA realized it no longer had to worry about incitement: the good old days, in which the world blamed Israel alone for the absence of peace, were back. The resolution, which wrongly deemed the settlements both illegal and an impediment to peace and demanded that all states take punitive action against them, . . . didn’t utter a word of criticism of the Palestinians.

True, it included a generic condemnation of incitement and terror, but without any mention of who was perpetrating said incitement and terror, allowing the Palestinians to claim that even this section was aimed solely at Israel. Kerry then reinforced the message by devoting the lion’s share of his speech to the settlements, with Palestinian incitement and terror coming only a distant second.

Consequently, the PA felt free to ramp its incitement back up to full force. And it did, to deadly effect. Shortly before the resolution passed, for instance, a Jerusalem Post reporter who asked more than two-dozen east Jerusalem Palestinians what they thought of reported plans to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem couldn’t find a single one who cared. But then the PA, bolstered by the resolution and Kerry’s speech, ordered all imams under its control to devote their sermons on Friday, January 6 to why the embassy move was unacceptable and would/could/should lead to violence. After all, the world could hardly object to that. Kerry himself had said exactly the same thing. And on January 8, an east Jerusalem Palestinian carried out the car-ramming that killed four soldiers. His relatives said he did so after hearing a local imam assail the proposed embassy move in his Friday sermon.

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.