Last April, a group of armed men entered the predominantly Christian West Bank village of Jifna, firing rifles, throwing firebombs and rocks at houses, and chanting the sort of anti-Christian invective associated with Islamic State. After initially condemning the incident, Palestinian Authority (PA) officials began downplaying it, blaming “personal” conflicts and failing to make any arrests. The Palestinian journalist Abd al-Ghani Salameh responded by posting an article to his Facebook page that, he said, was rejected by the newspaper that normally publishes his columns. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) provides a partial translation:

This criminal attack does not exactly come as a surprise, and it is nothing unusual in our society, despite what [Palestinian] media repeatedly claim. . . . Anyone who thinks that our country is immune to sectarianism is mistaken. We are no wiser than the Syrians, the Lebanese, or the Iraqis, who destroyed their lands with their own hands for the sake of stupid sectarian slogans. Simply put, those lands have ethnic and sectarian diversity, and their sectarian leaders’ coordination with the hostile foreign plots lit in them the fuse of civil war, until these lands were completely destroyed. Here in Palestine, I absolutely think—and I hope I am mistaken—that within every one of us is a sectarian demon, residing and hiding deep within.

If [this sectarianism] isn’t uprooted and taken care of on the national level, and if the maximal punishment is not meted out to the criminals, this criminal attack will be another a link in the chain of civil war, chaos, and societal collapse, just as happened in the neighboring countries.

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.