Wittingly or unwittingly, writes Robert Fulford, those who support the Palestinian regime in Ramallah and want it to become an independent state are backing those who glorify mass murder. Just recently, for instance, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) named a summer camp after one Dalal Mughrabi:

On March 11, 1978, Mughrabi directed the Coastal Road Massacre, in which 38 Israelis, including thirteen children, were killed and 72 were wounded. Mughrabi and eight other Palestinian terrorists also died. . . . She led a team of eleven who landed on the coastal plain near Tel Aviv. They hoped to create demonstrations that would shut down peace talks between Israel and Egypt. . . .

On the beach they encountered Gail Rubin, an American photographer taking nature pictures. They asked directions and after she answered Mughrabi killed her. On the coastal road, they hijacked a taxi, killing its occupants. They seized two buses and put all 71 passengers in one of them. Israeli soldiers stopped the bus and the two sides fired. The bus exploded. The Israelis say it exploded because Mughrabi blew it up with a grenade. . . . The plan to upset the Israel-Egypt talks failed; a peace treaty was signed and remains in force today. Even so, Mughrabi became, among Palestinians, a heroine and martyr, memorialized in the names of a public square, a computer center, and a soccer tournament, as well as a summer camp. . . .

There’s something especially ugly about celebrating Mughrabi’s achievement. She killed out of principle, but she killed at random. She willingly killed Israelis of every kind, and perhaps a few tourists who got in her way. She had no reason to think of them as human beings. It was killing for killing’s sake, intended to terrify other Israelis and make their existence unbearable. By raising her to the level of national standard-bearer, Palestinian leaders applaud the killing of innocents, morally authorizing others to do the same.

This attitude has carried over to the Knife Intifada, which began in 2015. Social media have been blamed for encouraging young would-be terrorists to draw knives abruptly and stab Israelis. But the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has helped create an aura of acceptance around this practice. While speaking publicly against violence, he recently met with Palestinians who carried out knife attacks and met with the family of a terrorist, [in keeping with his general practice].

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.