Yossi Beilin, a long-time leader of the Israeli peace movement and an architect of the Oslo Accords, is now working for a Brussels-based think tank where he advocates a “two-state solution” to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The think tank is run by a former deputy minister in the government of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Russian ex-president. James Kirchick writes:

[A]dvocating a resolution to the Ukraine crisis more extreme than that proposed by the Kremlin itself marks a sorry but fitting end to Yossi Beilin’s career. Beilin was an architect of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization establishing the Palestinian Authority as the government of a nascent independent state but which fell to pieces with the second intifada. A decade later and out of public service, he was the main mover behind the extra-governmental Geneva initiative, a draft permanent settlement to the conflict that went nowhere. In light of this string of failed diplomatic proposals, it’s perhaps appropriate that Beilin would push a “two-state solution for Ukraine.”

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.