Although the recent Security Council resolution condemning Israel—unlike those produced by other UN organs—has actual legal force, the next American president has the ability to limit its damage, as Abraham Sofaer argues:

[Donald Trump, once] president, can repudiate any international agreement. . . . He should thus inform the UN secretary-general before his first [required report on Resolution 2334] on March 23, 2017, that the U.S. repudiates the resolution—that the U.S. will veto any effort to enforce its conclusions. He should also seek legislation imposing trade sanctions on states that rely on the resolution to discriminate against Israel, as the U.S. did successfully against the Arab boycott.

Sofaer also refutes the claim of Obama administration officials, and their defenders in the media, who insist that the American decision not to veto the resolution is consistent with established policy:

Ambassador Samantha Power claimed U.S. presidents [including Ronald Reagan] have all been against expanding settlements. But no administration has ever supported calling all Israeli settlements “flagrant violations of international law,” not even the Obama administration, which vetoed a similar resolution in 2011.

President Reagan regarded the settlements as “legal,” and most other presidents have refrained from relying on inapposite principles of international law, shunning such ineffective hectoring. No administration has ever claimed Israel, as an “occupying power” during “war” must treat Palestine as a state. . . .

The abstention, in short, was a shameful act openly touted as punishment for Israel’s failure to abide by a U.S. policy that set back the prospects of peace. The Trump administration must repudiate Resolution 2334 in order to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution, by recognizing that Israel’s settlements are not an obstacle to peace if peace were genuinely pursued.

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.