In a recent article for the New York Times, the architecture critic Michael Kimmelman criticized a plan to create a system of cable cars in Israel’s capital to alleviate some of the traffic on the Old City’s crowded streets. While there may be good reasons to oppose the plan on aesthetic grounds, writes Jonathan Tobin, Kimmelman’s real concern appears to be what he sees as an attempt to create a “Jewish narrative of Jerusalem.”

Kimmelman and the Palestinians opposed to the project are offended by the fact that the cable-car system is part of an effort to keep the city united and functional. But they also seem particularly disturbed by the fact that the route of the car to the Western Wall will celebrate the city’s Jewish history. . . . Palestinians and their foreign friends think every action that reinforces Jerusalem’s status as the center of Jewish life for the past 3,000 years is part of a Zionist plot to “Judaize” the city. A primarily Jewish city can’t be Judaized. But what Israel’s opponents want is to erase history, not to preserve it.

They claim that the new system will marginalize Arabs living in neighborhoods over which the cars will travel and allow travelers to ignore their people. But their real beef is with the excavations of Jewish history in the Silwan [neighborhood] and the City of David that they would have preferred to go undiscovered.

The resistance to the cars on grounds that they are solidifying the hold of the Jews—the one people for whom it has always been their capital and the focus of their faith—is not merely wrongheaded, but rooted in anti-Jewish prejudice.

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.