On December 31, an Israeli court sentenced a Palestinian man to eighteen years in prison for the murder of a British student in Jerusalem; the culprit narrowly avoided a life sentence because of mental illness. Another Palestinian, however, did receive a life sentence on the same day: he was convicted by a Palestinian court of attempting to sell land to a Jew—a crime potentially punishable by death. Noting the scant attention paid to the second case by the Western media, which are normally so solicitous of jailed Palestinians, Stephen Daisley sees an unmistakable pattern:

Why talk about the Palestinians jailed for selling land to Jews when we can demand Israel release the Palestinians jailed for killing Jews? Why talk about the stipends paid to the families of terrorists who murder Israelis when we can condemn Israel for the security fence built to stop the terrorists getting in? Why talk about the Palestinians’ insistence that the West Bank be rendered Jew-free before they pledge to accept a state there when we can repudiate Israel’s cunning scheme to “Judaize” Judea? . . . Why, in short, face up to the real “obstacles to peace” when we can pretend building houses in the West Bank is what’s really holding things back? . . .

I’ve always railed against liberal blindness and hypocrisy on Palestinian extremism as a product of anti-Israel bias. I’m not so sure anymore. I’m starting to wonder if the real bias isn’t against the Palestinians. We expect Israel to operate like Belgium south of Beirut and castigate it for failing to live up to our values (or what we claim to be our values). We expect almost nothing of the Palestinians, and certainly not for them to conduct their affairs as we do (or tell ourselves we do). . . . .

[According to] the underlying assumptions of Western policy on the Middle East, . . . Israeli misdeeds are aberrations to be condemned and corrected while Palestinian misdeeds are shrugged off, excused, or justified. This is just who they are. The sentiment is sympathy but the logic is pure bigotry. We are not friends of the Palestinians. We are not lending them solidarity by indulging their outrages. We are treating them like a savage tribe, . . . benighted but noble in their own way, wide-eyed [and] grateful to the white man for understanding their backward customs. There is your racism.

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.