In 2017, the “Walled-Off Hotel” opened in Bethlehem, just a few feet from the security fence that runs through the West Bank. Its owner, the anonymous British “street artist” known as Banksy, has decorated it with his own artwork, making the entire hotel an exercise in fake-war-crimes kitsch. David Collier reports on his visit to the hotel:

On the one side, [the hotel] can be viewed as an obscene gimmick. A privileged activist gaining publicity through a stunt that objectifies people immersed in a real-world tragedy. On the other are the Jews, who are thoroughly demonized by the false narrative presented inside. Jews become alien god-killers, too greedy and racist to open their arms to a peaceful downtrodden people. In the middle are the useful idiots: ignorant tourists who come to the hotel, see the exhibits, and then leave slightly more radicalized than they were before they came. . . .

Inside the [hotel’s] museum are several videos. The most important one [purports to] place the conflict into context. . . . It is difficult to overstate the historical distortion in the video. . . . It completely denies Jewish history in the land and presents Jews as alien invaders. . . .

Throughout the museum, there is use of Holocaust imagery, part of an ongoing strategy of equating the results of the 1947-48 conflict with the Holocaust. . . . [One piece] suggests Israelis kill for money, Arabs die just so Israelis can test weapons, and the conflict only [exists] so that Jewish business can thrive. . . . Everywhere you look is the image of a brutal Holocaust committed by money-grabbing Jews against a defenseless and helpless population. . . . [This is not to mention the] classic anti-Semitic imagery [of] Jews as god-killers, [found in] an image of a Christlike figure with a red-dot sight on his forehead. . . .

[T]he truth is that . . . far more hate went into building the exhibits within the hotel than went into building the defensive wall it was designed to protest. One was designed to save lives, the other only sets out to demonize a people.

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.