This week, a six-person delegation of journalists from Arab countries visited Israel at the invitation of the foreign ministry. Among them was the Saudi blogger Mahmoud Saud, a vocal and public supporter of both the Jewish state and Benjamin Netanyahu. While en route to pray at the al-Aqsa mosque, Saud found himself physically attacked. Ruthie Blum writes:

Calling him a “traitor,” an “animal,” a “normalizer,” and a “Zionist,” these violent [Arab] hecklers cackled at him to “go to synagogue.” As if this weren’t bad enough, they also spat in his face and threw sticks and chairs at him.

[This incident] brings us to a key factor in the pointlessness of peace deals with the Palestinian leadership. Unlike Israel, which has a burgeoning understanding with many of its Arab neighbors based on a shared interest in preventing the Iranian regime from acquiring nuclear weapons, the Palestinians have been kissing up to Tehran.

In a meeting in Tehran on Sunday with the head of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations, the Hamas deputy chief Saleh al-Arouri reportedly said, “We are on the same path as the Islamic Republic—the path of battling the Zionist entity and the arrogant ones.” This followed a visit to Iraq late last month by Nabil Shaath, Mahmoud Abbas’s adviser for international relations, during which he told local Shiite leaders that “Palestinians don’t have a problem with Iran, as Iran has been supporting the Palestinian struggle. We seek to strengthen our relations with Tehran, and we don’t consider it an enemy. The enemy is 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.