In 1936, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the British-appointed grand mufti of Jerusalem, launched a general strike in Mandatory Palestine to protest the prospect of further Jewish immigration. The strike quickly led to violence and riots. After the initial violence had been quelled, Britain sent Lord William Peel to the land of Israel in order to head a commission that would investigate the situation and propose a solution. Oren Kessler, in a detailed look at the commission’s proceedings, describes its interviews with Arab leaders:

In mid-January [1937] the commissioners met Husseini. His appearance before them was short but sharp. The Mandate was illegitimate, he said, speaking through an interpreter. . . . What is more, he insisted, Jewish nationalism imperiled Muslim holy sites. . . . Creating a Jewish home in “an Arab ocean” has no historical precedent, he warned, and would make the Holy Land a permanent backdrop for blood. “It is impossible to place two distinct peoples, who differ from each other in every sphere of their life, in one and the same country.”

He reiterated his core demands: terminating the mandate, abandoning [Britain’s commitment to create a Jewish] national home, ceasing [Jewish] immigration, and prohibiting land sales. Questioned as to the fate of the 400,000 Jews already in Palestine, Husseini ventured only, “We must leave all this to the future.” Pressed as to whether the country could assimilate them, his response was brief. “No.”

In the subsequent days more prominent Arabs delivered testimony similar to Amin’s, berating Britain for the Mandate’s intrinsic inequity. The head of the Istiqlal party, [a hardline group but more moderate than Husseini], said the Arabs could neither forsake “one meter” nor the country handle one more immigrant. He refused to sit at the same table as Zionists, or to touch Mandate stamps because alongside [the Arabic word] Filastin they bore the Hebrew letters alef and yod, [the Hebrew acronym for “the land of Israel”].

In arriving at its suggestion that Mandatory Palestine be partitioned into Jewish and Arab states, the Peel Commission reflected the influence of this rejectionist Arab attitude. This, notes Kessler, “was Britain’s first recorded proposal of partition, of a ‘Jewish state,’ and of a two-state solution to the Palestine problem.”

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.