On Tuesday, the United Nations Social, Educational, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) passed a resolution condemning Israel, despite UNESCO’s being an ostensibly apolitical body. This resolution, hardly the first of its kind, typifies the UN’s perverse fixation on Israel, which, as Joshua Muravchik chronicles in a brief history, has existed nearly since the world body’s inception and interferes with its ability to do much else. The story begins with the UN’s approval of a plan to partition Palestine and the Arab world’s response: waging precisely the sort of aggressive war the body was formed to prevent:

Sadly, the UN did nothing to defeat this aggression or others that were to follow in other parts of the world. As a result, the world body grew up devoid of its intended purpose. In its place, member states have pursued a variety of other goals, chief of which have been decolonization, development, peacekeeping, and, remarkably, castigation of Israel. . . .

Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote that upon taking up his duties as chief U.S. ambassador to the UN in 1975, he was startled to discover that Israel was “the center of the political life” of the world body. Moynihan arrived just months after the first UN appearance by Yasir Arafat, chief of the PLO. The event marked a turning point in the UN’s treatment of Israel that ramifies to this day. . . . The PLO then was a long way from becoming the organization that signed the 1993 Oslo Accords with Israel and joined long-term negotiations toward [an ostensible] peaceful settlement. Rather, it was riding the crest of a campaign of international terrorism carried out not only on Israeli soil but also in skies and airports and streets around Western Europe and the Middle East.

The dramatic highpoint of that campaign had come two years earlier in Munich when a team of PLO terrorists disrupted the Olympic games by massacring eleven Israeli athletes. . . . The civilized world was repelled by this outrage but also intimidated. And the decision to invite Arafat to address the UN was in part a gesture of appeasement. . . .

Stunningly, when [Arafat] completed his pitiless tirade the assembly rose in the most raucous ovation that longtime observers had ever witnessed at the UN. By this response, the UN delegates signified that, whether motivated by ideology or by fear, they were prepared to back the cause of the PLO uncritically at whatever cost to Israel.

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.