In December, Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), issued a 120-page brief arguing that the court should consider the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and parts of Jerusalem as the already extant “state of Palestine”—as a precursor to trying Israel for committing crimes against humanity there. Maurice Hirsch comments:

In order to invent a state that does not exist, and has never existed, Bensouda needed to complete a complex puzzle. On the one hand, she had to negate or ignore critical documents that designated for Israel all the areas she now claims to be part of the “state of Palestine.” These documents include the Balfour Declaration, the decisions made by the allied forces in San Remo following World War I, and the League of Nations mandate for Palestine. All these documents reaffirmed the historic connection of the Jewish people to the area from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea and granted that area to the Jewish people for its future state.

On the other hand, she needed to discount . . . the Arab rejection of the [1947] UN Partition Plan, turn the 1948-9 armistice lines—which the Arab leaders demanded never be seen as borders—into borders, and negate clear provisions of the Oslo Accords that specifically deny the Palestinian Authority state status. These acrobatics were possible because the proceedings against Israel are not founded in either fact or law, but are entirely politically motivated.

Hirsch urges Jerusalem to discourage the ICC from making such a decision by holding the United Nations—which has some authority over the court, and has long cultivated the irrational and legally incoherent treatment of Israel that Bensouda has endorsed—responsible:

Israel should carry out a political preemptive strike by informing the United Nations that should the ICC decide to invent “Palestine,” all UN staff in Israel will be declared personae non gratae. First on that list would be the UN secretary-general’s special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Mladenov, who recently called for “Palestinian unity” against Israel. While this call may seem innocuous to some, in practice Mladenov called for Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud . . . to join hands with the internationally recognized terror organization Hamas.

Next, Israel should demand that the UN immediately vacate the Governor’s Palace compound in Jerusalem’s Armon Hanatziv neighborhood. The compound is home to the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, the UN force created to monitor the 1949 armistice lines. If the ICC invents [a Palestinian state] and sets its borders, thereby nullifying the armistice agreements, there is no need whatsoever for this UN force to remain in 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.