Last Friday marked the 37th anniversary of a Palestinian terrorist group’s attack on a Jewish restaurant in Paris, which left six dead and injured twenty more. Yves Bonnet, the French intelligence chief at the time, recently admitted that he made a deal with the perpetrators—an offshoot of Fatah known as the Abu Nidal group—guaranteeing that they could come and go as they please in France, so long as they did not carry out any further attacks within the country’s borders. In Bonnet’s words:

[I]t worked. There were no further attacks between the end of 1983 and the end of 1985. . . . Afterward, they carried out attacks in Italy, for example, but that did not concern me so long as there was nothing on French soil.

Jay Nordlinger comments:

In 1985, Palestinian terrorists hijacked the Achille Lauro, an Italian cruise ship. They singled out one passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, for murder. He was an American. But more important to the terrorists: he was a Jew.

He was traveling with his wife, Marilyn, in celebration of their 36th wedding anniversary. They had several friends with them. Klinghoffer was sixty-nine-years-old and confined to a wheelchair. The terrorists shot him and dumped him overboard.

We captured them, we Americans did. We captured the terrorists—some of them—who then spent time in Italian jail cells. After a while . . . poof. They walked. The Italians had their own [version of Bonnet’s realism].

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.