With the approach of the 100th anniversary of Britain’s declaration that it favored “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” a Palestinian campaign is underway to obtain an apology from the United Kingdom for this supposed injustice. Alex Joffe explains what the campaign reveals about Palestinian leaders’ aspirations and tactics:

[T]he campaign against the Balfour Declaration [characteristically involves] mistaking symbolism for practical action. Presumably an apology would achieve a partial restoration of Palestinian national honor and constitute another step toward the complete eradication of Israel. However, . . . it is difficult to see what direct value an apology would have in helping to establish a Palestinian state. . . .

The Balfour apology campaign is thus another element in the Palestinian wars against inconvenient historical facts that must be denied, attacked, rewritten, or otherwise assailed, rather than debated, conceded, or shared. This approach accounts for such extraordinary Palestinian claims as [Yasir] Arafat’s denial that there was ever a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem [and] Saeb Erekat’s statement that the Palestinians are descendants of Epipaleolithic inhabitants and thus the “real” indigenous population of the land. . . .

These [preoccupations]—redeeming lost honor, perpetual victimhood, international responsibility, and achieving through guilt what politics and force of arms cannot—are cultural ideas, transmitted endlessly by Palestinian leaders and through their educational system and media. But they are also reflected in Palestinian politics. At every turn, negotiations get to a stage and then stop because compromise would preclude full “restoration” of what never was. Fighting century-old events and hoping to produce another outcome is consistent with this pattern. It is unlikely to build either a stable Palestinian society or peace with 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.