Secretary of State Kerry has revived the myth that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is a prerequisite to the solution of all the Middle East’s problems. According to his recent statement, Muslim anguish over the plight of the Palestinians is “a cause of [IS] recruitment and of street anger and agitation.” Giving the lie to this claim is the enormous success of IS in drawing volunteers from Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent, where Muslims, even radical ones, rarely give thought to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The real reason for IS’s popularity lies elsewhere, according to Christina Lin:

Muslims in Southeast Asia were traditionally moderate and tolerant. But in the 40-odd years since the oil crisis and petrodollars became a windfall in the Muslim world, Saudi extremists have been proselytizing, and building mosques and madrassas that preach Wahhabism. [Former Singaporean prime minister Lee Kuan Yew has] argued that this Wahhabi brand is a “venomous religion” that has radicalized Southeast Asian Muslims. . . . It would be more helpful for the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition if Secretary Kerry would ask his Saudi and Qatari friends to stop feeding those [flames].

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.