In preparation for the centennial of the Balfour Declaration this November, Mahmoud Abbas has been campaigning for Britain to apologize for its 1917 commitment to establishing “a Jewish national home in Palestine,” and has even threatened to sue the United Kingdom for this alleged injustice. Last week, London issued a statement that it remains “proud of [its] role in creating the state of Israel.” Ruthie Blum comments:

In a piece in the Washington Post in October, the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat called the Balfour Declaration the “symbolic beginning of the denial of [Palestinian] rights.” He failed to mention that it was actually [Palestinian] leaders who have denied the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza their rights. Well before the 1967 Six-Day War, when the term “Palestinian people” was coined, Arabs rejected the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine—the original “two-state solution.” They have been refusing to reach any peaceful arrangement with Israel ever since.

The end result is on display for all to see. Israel has spent nearly seven decades building a booming democratic country, while the Arabs of Palestine have frittered away the time by engaging in acts of destruction. Yes, as the Jewish state marks 69 years since its establishment, 50 years since the reunification of Jerusalem, and 100 years since the Balfour Declaration, the Palestinian Authority is threatening to take Britain to court.

Let Donald Trump be reminded of this before hosting Abbas in the Oval Office and listening to his lies. The rest of us should take a break from discussions of war and peace to toast Balfour—and Israel’s success in a region otherwise characterized by failure.

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.