Last month, with the announcement of the peace agreement—signed yesterday—between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, one respected expert on the Arab world averred that “it’s hard to imagine an Arab country, if it were democratic, striking a peace deal with Israel” and that, moreover, “Israel, one of the region’s few democracies, prefers that its Arab neighbors not be democratic.” Some have taken this line of reasoning one step further, to suggest that Jerusalem is in some sense propping up Arab dictatorships. Nonsense, writes Seth Frantzman:

It was the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East in the 1950s that led the drive against relations with Israel. . . . These dictatorships inflamed a generation and brainwashed people against Israel, even as [they] normalized with other states that [with whom they had conflicts]; e.g., despite the India-Pakistan conflict, no one suggested not recognizing India forever. [By contrast], Israel always had relations with democracies.

[Furthermore], the argument that average citizens in the Middle East oppose Israel, and therefore Israel “needs” dictatorships is flawed. The public that was propagandized against Israel is sometimes hostile. However this is mostly a historical aberration. Israel had relationships with democracies like Turkey, and Iranians would make peace with Israel if not for their regime. Kurds would also be open to Israel if not for Saddam and then Iran occupying Baghdad.

Next, we need to ask why Israel is singled out for being responsible for “authoritarianism” in the Middle East when every single other nation in the world has relations with countries like Saudi Arabia.It is only [considered] a problem for Israel to have relations with the UAE. But when the U.S. or France has relations with the UAE or when Switzerland embraces Iran, it’s fine? This makes no sense.

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.