This week, unnoticed by the Western media, Palestinian demonstrations in Lebanon turned into violent confrontations with police. Precipitating the riots was Beirut’s crackdown on companies employing foreign laborers—mostly Syrian refugees and Palestinians—without work permits, which businesses must pay a fee to obtain. Now the protesters are demanding that Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of whom were born in the country, and are banned outright from dozens of professions, have the same rights to employment as “native” Lebanese.

Pinḥas Inbari explains:

The Syrian crisis caused a deep demographic change in Lebanon after one-million, mostly Sunni, Syrians flooded the country, including many Palestinians from the Syrian refugee camps. The change has introduced many radical elements and reinforced various al-Qaeda groups in the camps in Lebanon. Lebanon doesn’t want them to set down roots in the country, and in any case the Lebanese hate the Syrians and want to throw them out and to use the opportunity to get rid of the Palestinians. . . .

Generally, the crisis in Syria cut Syrian Palestinians off from the PLO, which has been unconcerned about them. (Almost 4,000 Palestinian men, women, and children were killed in the civil war.) The Palestinians formed ad-hoc groups to represent and care for themselves. No refugee from Syria wants to go to Palestine; they all want to go to Turkey and beyond to Europe.

Palestinian leaders, of course, have consistently demanded the “right of return,” which would mean that descendants of those who fled Israel during the 1948 war would be able to return to the Jewish state, even if there were a Palestinian state alongside it. The Trump administration’s peace plan would seem to involve the opposite: settling the descendants of those refugees in the countries where they live. This, argues Inbari, is exactly what Beirut and Ramallah fear, and exactly what Lebanese Palestinians want.

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.