To some fanfare, a new hotel has opened in the West Bank city of Bethlehem decorated with the work of the British graffiti artist who goes by the name Banksy. The artist describes his “Walled-Off Hotel,” which overlooks the security barrier cordoning off parts of the West Bank, as having “the worst view in the world.” Reuven Berko comments:

Banksy (who has never revealed his true identity) is calling for courage, but is protesting anonymously. His people explain on Facebook that he has taken the “loaded” view and turned the hotel into an “installation” against the occupation. They explain that the artistic boutique hotel creates a different reality through melting walls, courage and wisdom, creating change, and making art. What lofty . . . expressions to describe an anonymous anti-Semitic coward who refuses to identify himself or appear in the media, [and] who came here from England to operate against Jews. . . .

If Banksy looked out from his hotel at Bethlehem itself, he would see a particularly ugly view: the ghosts of a large Christian community that was wiped out by Bedouin rapists and Islamists from Hebron who stole the Christian bodies, souls, and property.

If Banksy had wanted to gaze at an ugly view, he’d look at the glass façade of the Park Hotel in Netanya, where he can envision the bodies of the Jews murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber while celebrating Passover there, when there was still no fence. Banksy might call the blood spilled on the walls and the floor “psychedelic conceptual art in a hotel of occupation.” He hasn’t shown his face there.

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.