On Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu publicly advocated the shuttering of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), created in 1949 to tend to Palestinian refugees displaced during the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli war. The prime minister was responding to the recent discovery of a Hamas military tunnel underneath an UNRWA school in the Gaza Strip—the most recent example of the organization’s facilities being used for terrorist purposes. But, writes Dore Gold, the problem goes much deeper:

Unlike the millions of refugees after World War II, who were resettled in the countries in which they now resided and became citizens, the Palestinian-Arab refugees from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war maintained their refugee status. . . .

Successful refugee programs, like that of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), have led to a diminution of the refugee problem in different parts of the world. UNRWA has had the exact opposite effect. The heart of UNWRA’s problem is definitional. . . . Unlike other UN refugee agencies, . . . UNRWA added “the descendants of Palestine refugee males” [to its mandate]. . . . UNRWA has now reached the fourth generation of refugees. . . .

There are 58 Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East. With the implementation of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, 26 of these camps fell under Palestinian control. Yet there was no indication that a single Palestinian camp was about to be closed. It was clear that the Palestinian Authority wanted these camps to be retained . . . to keep their grievance with Israel alive. In other words, they wanted to perpetuate the conflict. . . .

[T]he Palestinians’ preparedness to . . . resolve this issue is probably the best litmus test of their intentions—of whether they are ready to end the conflict once and for all. If a new peace initiative is to start, it should include at the outset a program to dismantle the refugee camps and promote a massive international effort for the construction of new housing. This initiative should begin in the West Bank but also should include Jordan, which hosts the largest Palestinian refugee population in the world.

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.