Last week, Jordan’s King Abdullah II gave his annual speech marking the anniversary of his country’s independence. Pinhas Inbari explains the implications of his remarks on the Palestinians:

Abdullah stated that Palestine is part of the “Arabism” [uruba] of the Great Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks declared on June 5, 1916, and stressed the centrality of the al-Aqsa Mosque as the primary responsibility of the Hashemites [Jordan’s ruling dynasty]. . . . [He thus] ignored Palestinian desires for a state—and Palestinian nationalism in general. . . .

The speech came after a progressive deterioration in relations between Jordan and the Palestinian Authority to the point of a break between the king and the head of the PA, Mahmoud Abbas. . . . Looming over the Jordanian-PA rift is the possible Jordanian option of closing the bridges over the Jordan River as Egypt closed its Rafah crossing with Gaza.

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.