Last week, three Arab Israelis shot two policemen dead on the outskirts of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem and then ran onto the Mount, where they were killed by Israeli security personnel. The Israeli government responded by briefly closing the Temple Mount for prayer, reopening it first to Muslims, then to Jews. In addition, it proposed stricter security measures, with predictable results, as Shmuel Rosner writes:

[Israel] installed metal detectors at the entrance to the site to prevent visitors and ostensible worshipers from smuggling weapons into the place—as Israel suspects some did. Israel also intends to install cameras to monitor the Temple Mount compound. For some reason, the new equipment “fanned criticism and protests that Israel had unilaterally changed the rules regarding religious worship and tourist visits at the complex.” . . .

[This is] a change that Muslim authorities should have embraced, unless there is something they want to hide from the cameras or a reason for them to evade the detectors. In other words, ask not why Israel insists on installing new security measures around the compound; ask why the Muslim authorities respond to these measures with such rage.

The answer to this question is also simple. The metal detectors are truly bullshit detectors. [The fact is that] the Temple Mount is not just a holy [place] of worship—it is also, and at times even more so, a political tool with which to hammer Israel. . . . So now the metal detectors are the new tool [for Palestinian propagandists] to manufacture a made-up threat to the Mount. The ultimate goal of the detectors’ opponents is not to heighten security or prevent bloodshed; it is to delegitimize Israel’s rule of the Old City. . . .

Israel is the one concerned with security—but the other side is not. The other side sees the terror attack at the compound as an opportunity to further its claim against Israeli presence in Jerusalem. If you remove all the “settlers”—that is, all Israelis—and all “soldiers”—that is, Israel’s security forces—from the area, [the logic goes], there will be security. Simply put: no Jews, no bloodshed.

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.