On Christmas day, a group of Palestinian Muslims stoned the car of the head of the Catholic Church in Israel. A few days prior, the Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that public Christmas celebrations in the West Bank would be limited, ostensibly because of the tense security situation. However, writes Bassam Tawil, its real motivation is entirely different:

[Palestinian] leaders . . . told the Christian population that there was no reason to celebrate while Palestinians were being shot and killed by Israelis—meaning those Palestinians killed while stabbing Jews with knives or running Jews down with cars.

On the eve of Christmas, however, it became clear that the real reason behind the PA’s decision to cancel public celebrations had nothing to do with Israel or the “intifada.” The decision, it turned out, came after threats by Muslim extremists to target Christians and their holy sites. Christian residents of Bethlehem and Ramallah said they received threats and demands to cancel celebrations from various Islamic groups. Their threats come in the context of ongoing Islamist persecution of Christians not only in the Palestinian territories but also in other Arab countries, such as Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Egypt.

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.