On Thursday, the new UN secretary-general, Antonio Guterres, nominated Salam Fayyad, former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (PA), to be the United Nations envoy to Libya. Nikki Haley, America’s ambassador to the UN, nixed the appointment, provoking a storm of criticism. While acknowledging that Fayyad has a good track record from his time in the PA government, Benny Avni argues that Haley made the correct move:

Naming “Palestine” as Fayyad’s state of origin, [as Guterres’s nomination did], is crucial. Never before had a person from a country that is not a full United Nations member been named to such a high post. American law forbids, moreover, funding any international organization that recognizes “Palestine” as its full member.

That’s a context in which the American refusal to approve of the elevation of the Palestinian to a key UN job takes on a certain logic. American officials, as well as their Israeli counterparts, sensed that Guterres’s move was yet another step in the Palestinian Authority’s strategy of gaining world recognition through creeping UN acceptance. . . .

[T]he UN nomination was not about Mr. Fayyad, but about the claim to statehood that his nomination represents. . . . [A UN spokesman, commenting on Fayyad’s nomination], noted that “no Israeli and no Palestinian has served in a post of high responsibility at the United Nations. This is a situation that the secretary-general feels should be corrected.”

Yet there are those here who wonder about the logic of correcting Turtle Bay’s long-held bias against assigning top jobs to citizens of Israel, a member of the United Nations since 1949, by naming to a top post an individual from a non-member state. Trying to explain it by conflating these two as if they were one smacks of annulment of the UN’s opposition to a “one-state solution.” Doing all this without first getting the nod from America, or any other key government, is what is amateurish.

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.