In a recent interview, the PLO official Saeb Erekat announced a radical response to imagined Israeli intransigence: revoking Palestinian recognition of Israel. Ruthie Blum comments:

In the first place, though the only concrete action required of the Palestinians at Oslo was to amend the PLO charter calling for Israel’s annihilation—and even this was only promised in a series of letters exchanged between Rabin and Arafat—its newer version was never ratified. Second, Israel is the only party that has upheld its [Oslo] commitments. . . .

The Palestinian terrorism war that is currently being waged against innocent civilians and soldiers erupted, according to Mahmoud Abbas and his henchmen, as a result of a change in the status quo on the Temple Mount. That there was no such change makes no difference. Spreading lies is how the Palestinian leadership operates. Its success at the dissemination of propaganda only serves to strengthen its resolve. . . .

There are disagreements among Israeli politicians, pundits, and the public about how to handle the current crisis. . . . But a crucial little fact keeps getting drowned out in the cacophony and camouflaged by blood: no official Palestinian body has ever recognized the Jewish state. This is worthy of at least a partial smile, because something that never existed cannot be canceled.

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.