Citing Martin Kramer’s essay in Mosaic on the history of the Balfour Declaration, Gil Troy admits the historical importance of the document whose anniversary was celebrated yesterday. But he cautions his fellow Zionists against overselling its significance:

The Jews’ legitimacy as a nation doesn’t depend on one Balfour declaration from 1917—or many of them [as Kramer shows there were]. Jews didn’t need an international permission slip: not in 1917 or even in 1947 from the United Nations, and certainly not today. Such affirmations are welcome. They should help legitimize Zionism. But these documents are window dressing.

No such papers compare with the Bible. They don’t rank with 3,500 years of Jewish ties to the land, which make Jews, as the human-rights activist Irwin Cotler [puts it], the original aboriginal people, still reading the same Bible, speaking the same language, continuing the same culture, on the same land. . . .

I am touchy on this point because our enemies are using the Balfour centennial to reduce the Zionist claims to these 67 words of diplo-speak rather than 3,500 years of nationhood. . . . [D]id Great Britain or the United States need some Balfour-type permit? Like most countries, in the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence these nations seized the moment, emerging proudly, unilaterally, without anyone’s permission—simply asserting their national identities and resulting rights. . . .

Jews don’t need a Balfour green-light when authorities in Abu Dhabi won’t play Israel’s anthem [at an international Judo tournament]. The Israeli champion Tal Flicker started singing “Hatikvah” anyway, without anyone’s permission.

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.