Surveying hundreds of Palestinian textbooks and teachers’ guides published between 2013 and 2019, Arnon Groiss finds no shortage of anti-Israel propaganda, which, he concludes, is even more virulent than what was found in the earlier crop of textbooks published in the previous decade:

These books are used in the Palestinian Authority (PA) territories, as well as in Gaza and in most schools in eastern Jerusalem. They are mandatory in all schools in these areas, including private ones and those operated by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). From the very start, the PA schoolbooks have featured [three fundamental premises regarding the conflict with Israel]: 1) de-legitimization of both Israel’s existence and the very presence of its six million Jewish citizens, . . . as well as the denial of the existence of Jewish holy places there, 2) demonization of both Israel and the Jews, and 3) advocacy for violent struggle for liberation, instead of education for peace and coexistence.

The PA schoolbooks published since 2016 have featured an alarming new phenomenon: the name “Israel” has been replaced in most cases by the epithet “the Zionist occupation,” thus deepening the formerly adhered-to line of non-recognition of Israel as a legitimate state and transforming a concrete entity—the state of Israel—into a mythical, all-evil, entity—Zionism—with accompanying [connotations] of fear and hatred.

Among the many examples Groiss cites is an eleventh-grade religious-studies textbook that states, “spreading corruption on earth is of the Children of Israel’s nature.” Other books praise the Munich Olympics massacre and other terrorist attacks, hailing their perpetrators as heroes and martyrs. Moreover, such propaganda is not limited to lessons in history, geography, and religious studies, but also appear in math, science, and language instruction. Thus a teacher’s guide for ninth-grade Arabic suggests that students be given “free time to reflect on the dangers of the Jews’ greedy ambitions in Palestine.”

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.