While it is not yet clear whether Jerusalem will go through with possible plans to apply its sovereignty to portions of the West Bank, EU diplomats have already warned that their countries might respond to such a move with sanctions or even the breaking of diplomatic relations. Eyal Zisser comments:

The EU doesn’t care about the Palestinians whatsoever. Its concern for international law, which it says Israel is violating, also isn’t a top priority. After all, the EU is indifferent to the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, and Brussels doesn’t typically care about Tibet and Western Sahara either.

Israel, however, is always seen as an attractive target to flagellate, for the purpose of winning Arab and Muslim brownie points. Beyond that, the EU still abides by its decades-long fixation whereby the Palestinian issue is the key to solving all of the Middle East’s ills. And while the Europeans don’t care much about the levels of poverty and distress throughout the Middle East, they are worried about the waves of immigration flooding their continent, due to unrest and instability in the Arab world, and are convinced that reprimanding Israel will help them turn the tide.

This, therefore, is a profound European undercurrent that even an arrangement with the Palestinians isn’t likely to reverse. Israel’s relations with these European countries will inevitably return to normal, as there are enough mature leaders in Europe—for example, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel—who are attentive to Israel and its problems and are cognizant of Europe’s own interests in maintaining ties with it. But we can assume that the bureaucrats in Brussels, supported by several European countries, will wait for the next opportunity to kick 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.