From the very beginning of her tenure as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley has forcefully criticized that body’s obsession with condemning Israel and its lack of concern over the horrors in Syria, nuclear proliferation in North Korea, and other weighty issues. She has now decried the most recent attempt to slander the Jewish state, as Noah Rothman writes:

Perhaps the most promising display of righteousness occurred this week when Ambassador Haley condemned the repulsive report issued by the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. The report, issued by a group based in Beirut comprising eighteen Arab nations—including the non-existent “state of Palestine”—accused Israel of imposing “apartheid” on the Arabs in Judea and Samaria. Among the report’s authors was the former special UN rapporteur Richard Falk, whose anti-Israel prejudice is matched by few. Falk has praised terrorist organizations like Hamas, likening them to the French resistance [during World War II], excused the targeting of Israeli Jews in attacks, and [trafficked in 9/11 conspiracy theories]. The report is so obviously detached from reality that even the United Nations secretary-general’s office refused to endorse its findings. . . .

Haley’s ascension to the post of UN ambassador represents a repudiation of the Obama administration’s approach of creating “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel—and not a solitary one. Barack Obama’s efforts to remake the Middle East and rehabilitate Iran had the unintended effect of drawing Israel closer to its Sunni Arab-dominated neighbors. The Trump administration’s renewed commitment to Israel ensures that the Jewish state is less isolated than ever.

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.