The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), at the request of the Human Rights Council, has issued a “a database of all business enterprises involved in certain specified activities related to the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” Stephen Daisley explains why the Council—whose members include Qatar, Pakistan, Libya, and Venezuela—is so concerned with commerce in this fictitious region:

[This] list doesn’t explicitly encourage the blackballing of companies mentioned. But it is a nod and a wink to the methods of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. It’s too obvious to be clever but it’s still sly: a coycott, rather than a boycott.

BDS’s economic warfare against the Jewish state has had little success, but that’s not the point: a UN body is tacitly legitimizing its agenda and even doing the research for it. The UN’s obsession with this tiny strip of land on the shores of the Mediterranean has nothing to do with human rights. If Vlad the Impaler were around today, he’d be a special rapporteur on exsanguination and no one in Geneva would see anything untoward about it.

Israel can take care of itself. The people the UN harms when it works to isolate and delegitimize Israel are the Palestinians, and not just the 36,000 who work in the settlements. It rewards and reinforces the rejectionist mindset that has kept them stateless and will go on keeping them stateless. It tells them that their long, painful campaign of national self-harm is just and holds out false hope that it will one day triumph. It won’t. Israel is here to stay, and the priority of anyone who professes to be pro-Palestinian should be convincing the Palestinians to recognize that fact and, on that basis, finally accept offers of peace and statehood. If you care about Palestinian human rights, your efforts should be directed toward creating a Palestinian economy in which the companies listed by the OHCHR want to invest.

Until then, put [the] list to good use. Buy from, sell to, and invest in the very companies [it singles] out. . . . I appreciate some of you will have misgivings about getting mixed up with dangerous sorts like date-growers and pastry chefs, but trust me: it’s all for a good cause.

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.