A group of municipal workers and officials recently entered the Arab neighborhood of al-Tur on the Mount of Olives—and, in the middle of the night, carried out a crackdown on the lawlessness that has become commonplace in many parts of eastern Jerusalem. David M. Weinberg explains:

Under police protection, [the officials] hauled away abandoned vehicles, piles of garbage, and rubble from ruined buildings. They took down dangerously placed signs and illegal sheds. They erased graffiti, fixed broken street lights, and painted road-safety markings. They enforced business codes by confiscating merchandise placed in public areas without permits, checked for violations of safety rules, issued fines for illegally commandeered parking spaces, and more.

The police also combed through the neighborhood with lists in hand to confirm that people under house arrest were really at home. They found an illegally held M1 rifle, and arrested twenty Arab residents of eastern Jerusalem suspected of throwing rocks and firebombs at civilians and police. . . .

The Jerusalem district police commander, Yoram Halevy, said these operations are . . . part of the implementation of a new strategy . . . to shift from only “chasing the bad guys” to also “nurturing the good guys,” so that the latter “can help the police help them.”

It is quite clear to me, [however], that there is more to this strategy than just “nurturing the good guys.” The enforcement operations are . . . part of a broader plan to insure effective and equitable Israeli rule over a united Jerusalem. They aim to push back against proposals for cutting Arab neighborhoods out of the Jerusalem municipality or for handing them over to the Palestinian Authority.

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.