Reacting to a recent UNESCO resolution that implicitly denies the historical Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, Yossi Klein Halevi points to the destructive agenda behind it:

At the heart of the anti-Zionist assault is the notion that the Jews aren’t a people but only a faith. That premise is normative throughout the Arab world, and especially in the Palestinian national movement, all of whose factions—from Fatah to Hamas—deny the existence of a distinct Jewish people with a right to national sovereignty.

The Jewish [calendar] tells a different story. Passover celebrates the birth of the Jewish people, the beginning of a coherent historical narrative. Shavuot, two months later, celebrates the giving of the Torah at Sinai, imprinting the Jewish people with a distinct path to God. The Jews, then, are a people, with a specific faith. In that order. . . . There is no Judaism without the Jewish people and its story. . . .

The UNESCO resolution erases us from our own story. There were no temples on the Temple Mount; the Mount isn’t the holiest site in Judaism; the Western Wall isn’t the heart of Jewish prayer. Of all the attempts to destroy us throughout our history, the campaign against history itself is the most devious. . . .

The current assault on the Jewish story is so dangerous precisely because it strikes at the core of Passover. If we lose the story, our sense of the basic justness of our narrative, we will lose the essence of our being.

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.