In recent months, the suggestion to build an offshore port for the Gaza Strip has been circulating in think tanks and among Israeli officials. Ostensibly the port would allow the territory to import and export goods more freely while also enabling Israel to monitor shipments for weapons. Initially, the idea was to build an artificial island a mile or two off Gaza’s coast; now Cyprus has been proposed as a possible location. Martin Sherman argues against both plans:

[First], how would Israel monitor the use of dual-purpose materials like fertilizer (also ‎used to make explosives), metals (used in ‎rockets), and cement? Even today, despite strict ‎supervision, about 90 percent of the cement delivered into ‎Gaza is appropriated by Hamas for non-civilian ‎purposes, such as the construction of terror ‎tunnels. ‎. . . And in the ‎Cyprus version, how would Israel be able to prevent ‎military equipment from being smuggled onto a vessel ‎left ‎unsupervised after it departs Cyprus and begins traveling to Gaza? . . .

[The primary] reason offered in ‎support of the idea is that the proposed Cyprus port ‎would ease the economic hardship in Gaza and therefore diminish the violence ‎against Israel, and also that it would be contingent on the ‎return of two Israelis and ‎the remains of two IDF soldiers ‎held by Hamas.

The first argument essentially validates the false Palestinian ‎narrative that terrorism is the result of the ‎‎“occupation” and therefore Israel is responsible for ‎it. [But] if [Palestinians] ‎want to improve their situation in Gaza, all they ‎have to do is to stop trying to murder Jews and ‎allow Israeli entrepreneurship and creativity to ‎help Gaza prosper. ‎

The second argument essentially fuels Palestinian ‎extortion. If holding bodies and live captives gets ‎the Palestinian a port, why wouldn’t they see it ‎as a clear invitation to continue with this policy?‎ [Furthermore], Gaza already has a ‎port: Ashdod, an Israeli city closer to Gaza ‎than it is to most other Israeli cities. The Ashdod port ‎can easily meet all of Gaza’s needs. Besides, in the ‎event of war, does anyone really want the ‎Palestinians to have access to a port?

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.