Yesterday, Benjamin Netanyahu appeared at a conference in Warsaw alongside representatives of several Arab states—a clear sign of the improving relations between Israel and its former enemies. But do Arab citizens approve of their governments’ increasing cooperation with Jerusalem? David Pollock shows, based on a extensive polling data, that a surprising number do. In the same discussion, the pollsters Nader Said and Tamar Hermann comment on, respectively, Palestinian and Israeli public opinion. Said notes that a majority of Palestinians in Gaza oppose the March of Return riots, while nearly half of those in the West Bank oppose terrorist attacks on Israelis. For Hermann, the big news is the collapse of the Israeli left. (Video, 91 minutes. Written summaries are available at the link below.)

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.