In response to the Israeli cabinet’s decision to freeze a plan to install a mixed-sex prayer area at the Western Wall, and to the intense expressions of American Jewish outrage that greeted it, Liel Leibovitz suggests that those unhappy with the decision try engaging in the hard work of old-fashioned politics:

If you’re displeased with leaders who have little interest in the fine and exhausting art of politics, the answer is to do it yourself and [go] to Israel. When you get there, don’t stage media-friendly protests or schedule meetings with senior officials just to cancel them. Instead, just chat up a few folks, and you’ll soon see surprising coalitions taking shape. . . .

Imagine that the same people who argue so passionately about the right of all Jews to pray anywhere would extend the same universal principle to Jews wishing to pray on the Temple Mount, just a few feet away. Imagine that those who are perfectly comfortable offending the rigid sensibilities of pious Jews felt the same way about the equally rigid sensibilities of pious Muslims, and informed both that if you believe in freedom of religion, well, you believe in it everywhere and for everyone. Do that, and you wouldn’t just make a logically and morally sound argument, you’d also open up a dialogue with a large swath of religious Israelis who may support you because they would come to see you not only as a leftist social-justice warrior but as a principled person committed to grown-up politics.

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.