On Thursday, the newly appointed American ambassador to Turtle Bay gave a press conference following a routine Security Council meeting regarding the Middle East. The editors of the New York Sun were impressed:

The ex-governor of South Carolina was ridiculed by the left when the president first sent her nomination up to Capitol Hill, owing to her alleged lack of foreign-policy chops. She certainly rang the wake-up gong for that crowd this morning. . . . Tough as nails but with a smile and a layer of Southern charm.

The ambassador had just come from the regular monthly Security Council meeting on Middle East issues. She said it was her first such meeting, and “it was a bit strange.” The Security Council, she said, is supposed to discuss how to maintain international peace and security. But the meeting, she said, was not about Hizballah’s illegal buildup of rockets in Lebanon; it was not about the money and weapons Iran provides to terrorists; it was not about how we defeat Islamic State; it was not about how we hold Bashar al-Assad accountable for the slaughter of thousands of civilians. “No,” she said, “instead the meeting focused on criticizing Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East.” . . .

The ambassador made clear that the Trump administration will not support the kind of resolution from which the Obama administration’s ambassador—Samantha Power—shamefully abstained. . . . [Haley] warned that it is “the UN’s anti-Israel bias that is long overdue for change,” and said America will not hesitate to speak out in defense of its friend in Israel.

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.