Every member of the UN belongs to one of five regional organizations that are responsible for distributing committee chairmanships as well as the rotating seats on the Security Council. Until 2004—when it was admitted to the Western European group—Israel was the one nation not included in a regional body, and was thus excluded from such positions. Now, writes the Israeli ambassador Danny Danon, Israel hopes to build on its admission to win a chance to sit on the Security Council:

It was only last year, in 2016, that I was elected to chair the Sixth (Legal) Committee, becoming the first Israeli to chair a UN permanent committee. What is usually a position confirmed by consensus [was obtained by] a protracted and complicated campaign in which we had to cajole and convince 109 countries to cast their ballot for an Israeli.

[Now] Israel has set the ambitious goal of obtaining one of the three non-permanent seats on the Security Council in 2019 [reserved for members of the Western Europe group]. To do so we must convince two-thirds of General Assembly members of the worthiness of this cause.

Make no mistake about it, we are as deserving as any other nation of this leadership role: Israel funds a higher percentage of the UN budget than do the other 65 countries yet to serve on the Security Council combined. Moreover, few countries have Israel’s firsthand experience of the failures of the UN—and its acute awareness of the possibilities were this organization to be set on the right path.

On our northern borders the peacekeeping forces of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) play a vital role in keeping volatile situations relatively stable. Still, this force has not lived up to its potential and must do much more to fulfill its mandates. Despite UNIFIL’s presence on the ground for decades, Hizballah has been allowed to grow largely unchecked. The Iran-backed terrorist group’s aggressive posture led to a bloody war in 2006. And more recently, it has increased its arsenal from 7,000 rockets in 2006 at the end of the Second Lebanon War to almost 150,000 rockets today, aimed at our cities and towns.

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.