The Israeli delegation to the UN organized a reenactment on Tuesday of the historic 1947 vote in which the world body approved the plan to partition Palestine. On Wednesday, the UN General Assembly observed its “international day of solidarity with the Palestinian people”—in which, as Benny Avni puts it, the UN remembers “one of the only consequential decisions [it] ever took by celebrating those who rejected it.” Yet, Avni writes, although recognition from Turtle Bay has become a focus of Palestinian aspirations, it is hardly a sufficient condition for statehood:

Long before partition, the Zionists had competing political parties, active and effective workers’ unions, universities, and scientific research institutes. A free press thrived, a budding legal system developed, and, [despite] early fights among Jewish militias, a united army under civilian control was formed as soon as independence was declared.

It wasn’t at all perfect. Nothing is. But the Zionists weren’t promising to be a stable democracy sometime in the future. They were demonstrating one right then and there. Not so the Palestinians. They’ve been declaring a state forever, but their pursuit of UN recognition has put the cart before the horse. . . .

In Palestinian-controlled West Bank cities and in Hamas-ruled Gaza, political differences are resolved by force. Armed groups violently compete with each other. The powers-that-be control the legal system. Corruption is rampant. Dissent is suffocated. The Palestinian Authority’s President Mahmoud Abbas is nearly a decade past the end of his one elected term, yet he still wields power.

The United Nations, the Arab League, the Saudi plan, President Trump’s new peace deal, BDS, or any other BS—none will create a Palestinian state. Only the Palestinians will, and they’re far behind.

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.