In recognizing that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, President Trump was simply following the longstanding verdict of Congress, which has more than once called upon the executive branch to acknowledge reality. But, write the editors of the New York Sun, Congress would never have come to this conclusion without the efforts of the late Daniel P. Moynihan during his time in the U.S. Senate. They cite an incident that occurred in the early 1990s at the offices of the Forward:

[Moynihan] pulled out of his pocket a State Department telephone directory, which had Jerusalem listed as, in effect, its own country. The Democratic senator, formerly America’s envoy at the United Nations and ambassador to India, ranted at our foreign service. He was eager to move forward with some kind of legislative action.

At the same time, Moynihan quoted a warning that he attributed to Israel’s sixth prime minister, Menachem Begin. It was that the Jerusalem question can’t be solved in the United States Congress. Moynihan’s point was that only Israel itself can decide where its capital is. Of course, Israel had long since done that, and Moynihan’s view was that it was up to us to acknowledge, to recognize it. Had he lived, the Democrats might have had a leading role in winning recognition.

In the years after Moynihan, the Democratic party started to put distance between itself and Israel’s democratically elected government. This became painfully obvious in 2012, when the Jerusalem issue was temporarily stripped from the Democratic platform and the party’s pro-Israel faction was left humiliated.

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.