Participating in an interfaith conference on race relations in Birmingham, Alabama, Joshua Berman, an American-born Israeli rabbi and scholar, was struck by the refrain, expressed by several black intellectuals in attendance, that African-American leaders have betrayed their community by cultivating a sense of victimhood and rage. Berman draws some instructive parallels to the situation of the Palestinians:

[O]ne after another, these speakers—leading black conservatives—rejected the identity politics of victimhood dominant in black America as detrimental to black self-interest and to efforts toward racial reconciliation. . . . [F]or the Black Power movement, [which exerted increasing influence after the murder of Martin Luther King], permanent victim status must be maintained; as [the political commentator] Derryck Green noted: “Leaders of the movement will keep the ‘conversation’ [about race] going interminably because of the amount of social virtue and capital associated with the assumption of white guilt and black victimization.”

Well-meaning whites also contribute to the corrosive effects. . . . In his book, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, the black theorist Shelby Steele argues that white Americans view blacks as victims to ease their guilty conscience, and blacks attempt to turn their status as victims into a kind of currency that does nothing to assist blacks in improving their own lot. The result is that blacks internalize their sense of being beholden to the white bureaucrats who now control their lives. Government handouts based on race discourage . . . personal responsibility, thus diminishing their recipients’ self-worth further. . . .

As I followed these arguments it was hard not to see that Palestinian . . . politics suffers from the same set of ills. . . . Grass-roots criticism of the Palestinian leadership is disallowed because it threatens the collective Palestinian identity. Failing to establish the institutions of a functioning state, Palestinian leaders turn to globetrotting in “a virtue-signaling, look-busy-while-doing-nothing action plan of self-righteousness,” [to take Green’s description of African-American leaders]. They insist the world must come and save them.

Palestinians pluck the chords of European colonial guilt in order to receive generous aid, with the result that Palestinians internalize their sense of being beholden to their European benefactors, further discouraging Palestinians’ personal responsibility and diminishing their self-worth. But above all, the Palestinian narrative of victimhood sabotages efforts to achieve a lasting peace with Israel.

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.