Speaking on American television about the urgent need for Palestinian statehood, King Abdullah II of Jordan asserted that the only alternative for Israel was a state with a Jewish minority and an Arab majority. This argument from demography, writes Jerold Auerbach, is based entirely on false data:

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Labor Statistics, waging what it has labeled a “civil intifada” against Israel, insists that 2.6 million Palestinians inhabit [the West Bank]. But according to Israeli demographer Yoram Ettinger, the Palestinian Bureau has inflated the actual number of West Bank Palestinians (1.6 million) by two-thirds, including overseas residents, under-reporting Palestinian emigration, and double-counting Jerusalem Arabs. Between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, two-thirds of the population is Jewish. Furthermore, during the past 20 years Palestinian birth rates have stabilized while Jewish births have significantly increased. “There is no demographic machete,” Ettinger concludes, “at the throat of the Jewish state.”

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.