Since it came to light that he had previously worked as a legal consultant for the PLO, William Schabas has stepped down as head of a UN inquiry into alleged violations of international law during the most recent Gaza war. But Schabas’s disdain for Israel was no secret, and besides, Gerald Steinberg writes, the entire proceeding lacks legitimacy:

The original UN Human Rights Council mandate [for the investigation] reflects the inherent bias of a body whose agenda, appointments, and sessions are controlled by the 56-nation Islamic bloc. . . . As in many such UN kangaroo courts, the case against Israel . . . was to be based largely on the “evidence” provided by the network of anti-Israel groups claiming a human-rights agenda.

Although claiming to be investigations, each of [the] documents [produced by these groups] is based on a combination of unverifiable Palestinian “testimony” and aspirational international law, meaning that legal principles are invented in order to put Israel “in the dock,” to use Schabas’s terminology.

With so much evidence of failure, any continuation of this pseudo-investigation would only serve to highlight the immoral exploitation of human rights and international law as a weapon to target Israel. In contrast, the demise of the UN’s Schabas commission would mark the long-delayed end to this farce.

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.