The Kurds living in the Syrian region of Rojava have established a quasi-state that is an oasis of individual freedom and relative stability; their brethren in Iraqi Kurdistan have accomplished something similar. Unlike the Palestinians, they have made little effort to gain international recognition, focusing instead on the essentials. Bob Feferman and Dan Feferman write:

[The Kurdish leader Abdullah] Ocalan, who sits by himself in a Turkish island prison, left [his former] Arafat-like ways of terror behind, as he realized that fighting Turkey for independence was not realistic and cost his people too high a price. Instead . . . Ocalan’s followers, who number roughly 4.5 million Kurds in northern Syria, have established a number of democratic city-states—where gender equality is enforced almost as extremely as the exact opposite is just a few miles away in Islamic State-controlled areas. Elections ensure that the region’s non-Kurds are represented equally in matters of [public] decision making. . . .

The . . . Kurds in both Syria and Turkey, and the Kurds of northern Iraq, realized that the trappings of statehood meant little if the basis for a functioning society underneath was absent. Instead, the Kurds turned inward to gain stability. Rather than apply for meaningless membership in myriad international organizations, they sought economic prosperity and good governance.

In clear contrast, the Palestinians have tried bullying their way to independence by waging terrorism through suicide bombings, stones, bullets, and knives.

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.