While Theodor Herzl thought that by bringing Western technology and economic development to an impoverished corner of the Ottoman empire, a Jewish state could easily win over the Palestinian Arab population, his admirer Vladimir Jabotinsky was much more skeptical. Jabotinsky, writing nearly a century ago, understood that many Arabs would be unwilling to sacrifice what they saw as their own national pride for promises of prosperity. In a recent interview with a Qatari television program, Ismail Haniyeh, the head of the Hamas politburo, made this point brutally clear, as the translators of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) explain:

Haniyeh . . . said in a July 26, 2020 interview . . . that Israel has previously agreed to the establishment of an airport and seaport in the Gaza Strip in exchange for ceasefire, but that the Palestinian Authority (PA) and other Arab parties have blocked this from taking place under the pretext that it would constitute a separation between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. He said that under such an arrangement, Gaza would become like Singapore, [and] then claimed that a certain Arab country has offered as much as $15 billion for ports and economic projects in Gaza.

Haniyeh summed up his response to this offer, and the ensuing conversation, thus:

“We said to [this Arab country’s representatives], ‘That’s great. We want an airport and a seaport, and we want to break the siege on the Gaza Strip. This is a Palestinian demand, but what are we supposed to give in return?’ Of course, . . . they want us to disband the military wings of [Hamas and other terrorist groups], and incorporate them into the [PA] police force.’

“Naturally, we completely rejected that offer. . . . We cannot, in exchange for money or projects, give up Palestine and our weapons. We will not give up the resistance, Jerusalem, our people in the West Bank, or our right of return to the land of Palestine. So we did not go along with those plans.”

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.