The Jewish state has scored a series of small but significant diplomatic victories in the past two weeks. These range from a vote in the Czech parliament calling on its government to show “respect” for Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital, to Denmark’s decision to withhold some $8 million from organizations that it believes might be supporting BDS and incitement to terror. Evelyn Gordon comments:

Several factors contributed to these victories. One is the way Israeli NGOs are serving as force multipliers for Israeli diplomacy. . . . [Another is that] official Israel began pushing back against [support for anti-Israel NGOs, Palestinian incitement, and so forth] in talks with European governments, thereby depriving them of a perfect excuse for inaction. Europe will never be more pro-Israel than Israel’s own government.

Second, Israel has finally developed the confidence to play hardball, as it did by downgrading ties with New Zealand and Senegal, [both] co-sponsors of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, [condemning settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem], last December. Ties with Senegal were restored this week after the Muslim-majority country promised to support Israel’s bid for observer status at the African Union, which it had previously opposed. The New Zealand rupture is expected to end soon.

This confidence undoubtedly stems in part from Israel’s growing diplomatic strength outside the West, as highlighted most recently by Benjamin Netanyahu’s address on Sunday to the summit of the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS). He was the first Israeli leader to address ECOWAS, which even moved the summit from Saturday to Sunday to accommodate him. The group invited him even though two of its fifteen members have no diplomatic relations with Israel, and it pointedly preferred him to another nonmember guest: Morocco’s king. The West African monarch announced he would skip the summit rather than attend alongside Netanyahu, but that gambit signally failed to result, as it once would have, in Israel being disinvited.

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.