Last Friday, in response to a petition filed by the Palestinian Authority, Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), announced that she is opening an investigation against Jerusalem for alleged war crimes committed during the 2014 Gaza war and in subsequent anti-terror efforts. Twice before, Bensouda had rebuffed the court’s request that she investigate Israel for other allegations. Ben-Dror Yemini points out some of the many flaws of the current investigation:

[First], a complaint to the ICC can only be filed by a state, which Palestine is not. In addition, the Oslo Accords state that the Palestinian Authority does not possess the legal standing to file such a petition at an international court. But . . . this is an assembly of judges who have been appointed by nations hostile to Israel.

It is a fact that the majority of fatalities [in military conflicts around the world] over the last two decades have been innocent civilians. Sometimes it is done with malice, such as the Darfur genocide or the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime against its civilians or the Iranian-sponsored bombings and starvation in Yemen. Sometimes it is done unintentionally, such as the death and destruction in the Iraqi city of Mosul, where some 190,000 civilians perished in the battle against Islamic State.

Apart from the former president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, none of the people involved in these incidents was ever indicted. Bashir was never extradited, due to widespread support from various Arab and Muslim nations, nations in Africa, as well as China and Russia.

[Moreover], the data show that compared with other militaries around the world, Israel has far fewer civilian casualties during its military operations.

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.