Guatemala declared that it would do the same. The editors of the Weekly Standard explain why this matters:

“It is important to be among the first,” the Guatemalan president Jimmy Morales said on Monday at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference, “but it is more important to do what’s right.”

Guatemala was one of only nine nations that backed the U.S. embassy move when the UN passed a resolution condemning it. The other countries were similarly small players on the global stage: Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Togo, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and of course Israel.

We hear the guffaws of the foreign-policy elite in Washington and London and Paris. Guatemala? Honduras? Togo? The alignment of these few little nations with U.S. policy is itself, members of this elite suggested, an indication of just how outlandish the American policy is.

Well, okay. But 35 nations merely abstained in the UN vote, and many of them are both sizable and influential: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, to name a few. We wonder what would happen if some of these nations also decided to move their embassies to Jerusalem? Perhaps not much, or perhaps some halfhearted protests in Middle East capitals and some formulaic denunciations from the usual suspects in Turtle Bay. Perhaps not even that. . . .

[F]ar from jeopardizing the at-present nonexistent peace process, moving those embassies would help to rid future negotiations of the pernicious delusion that the Palestinians may one day control all of Jerusalem. The only basis on which to negotiate is the truth, and so far the U.S. and Guatemala are the first openly to acknowledge that truth. Others are welcome to follow.

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.