By opening an investigation into the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor has accepted that there is, in fact, a Palestinian state. Granting such recognition to “Palestine,” writes Eugene Kontorovich, flies in the face of international law and the ICC’s own founding documents:

[T]he prosecutor did not actually determine that Palestine qualifies as a “state” under the well-established legal definitions of the term. Rather, she said that the UN General Assembly’s vote in 2012 to call Palestine a “non-member state” is dispositive of the question. In short, she substituted the determination of the General Assembly for her own. The General Assembly is not a judicial body, but a political one. Its determinations are political, not legal. It also has no power under the UN Charter to create or recognize states. . . .

Unfortunately, this is not the first time the prosecutor has deferred to judgments of the General Assembly in lieu of legal analysis. Even more unhappily, the other recent occasion also involved Israel, and the prosecutor grabbed onto General Assembly resolutions to find an “occupation” where it could not be said to exist under normative international law, including International Court of Justice precedents. An Office of the Prosecutor that merely echoes the General Assembly is in danger of becoming simply another UN Human Rights Council.

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.