Ari Fuld, the Israeli Jew stabbed to death by a Palestinian terrorist on Sunday, was a resident of the town of Efrat—part of an area of Israel from which Jews were violently expelled in 1948, and to which they returned after 1967. Thus, many reports on Fuld’s murder have emphasized that he is “a settler,” a term that has become one of contempt. Jonathan Tobin explores this attitude in his review of a recent HBO documentary on the Oslo Accords and their aftermath:

Like the hundreds of thousands of other Jews who live in the West Bank and Jerusalem, Fuld was reviled as an “obstacle to peace.” That’s why the reaction to attacks on those who fall into this category is so often one of heartless indifference—if not gloating about people who had it coming—on social media and elsewhere. Not only Palestinians who consider all violence against Jews justified acts of “resistance” hold this attitude. Across the world and even among many Jews, “settler” is an epithet more than a description. Since the Oslo Accords were signed 25 years ago, settlements and settlers have become the all-purpose scapegoat for the lack of peace and [are often considered] undeserving of sympathy even when settlers are slain by terrorists. . . .

Oslo Diaries puts forward the thesis that there were two peace camps—one in Israel led by Prime Minister Yitzḥak Rabin and his government, and the other led by the Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasir Arafat. Opposing them were two anti-peace camps—one led by the current prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Likud party, and their settler supporters, and the other composed of Hamas and other Palestinians who opposed peace.

According to this account, the agreement was destroyed by Baruch Goldstein, the settler who murdered 29 Arabs in cold blood [in 1994]; Yigal Amir, the right-wing student who assassinated Rabin; and Netanyahu, who, [according to the documentary], encouraged extremism and sabotaged a process that was on the verge of working. [Thus], post-Oslo Palestinian terror is seen as merely a response to Goldstein’s terrible crime, rather than something that went on before and after the Hebron massacre, [as indeed it did]. . . .

But while Goldstein and Amir’s names will forever live in shame (and they did great damage to Israel), neither they nor Netanyahu and the settlers killed the peace. That was the work of Arafat and his associates. Far from heading a peace camp, we now know from both later events and subsequent revelations that Arafat did not share the peacemakers’ vision. . . . Indeed, as soon as the PLO began assuming control over parts of the West Bank and Gaza in 1994, both Arafat’s Fatah Party and his Hamas rivals began a bloody campaign of terrorism. . . . But [the actions of Arafat and his successors aren’t] allowed to challenge the illusion that the peace plan would have worked had not the settlers violently opposed it—an illusion the film tries to keep alive.

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.