A Labor-party member of Israel’s Knesset gave an impassioned speech last week accusing the Israeli right of having “lost Zionism some time ago.” In fact, Liel Leibovitz argues, the speech by Stav Shaffir, widely circulated online, shows Labor as the party that has lost touch with the Zionist spirit:

As students of history know, Zionism is notoriously elusive. Conceived as a movement to create a national homeland for Jews, the ideology had always contained multitudes, accommodating those who believed that Jews should settle only in the Promised Land and those who were willing to settle for Uganda, those who saw Zionism as a cultural undertaking and those who understood it as a socioeconomic quest, those who sought answers in the heavens and those who planted trees in the ground. It could welcome the pragmatist [David] Ben-Gurion and the hardliner [Vladimir] Jabotinsky, the agnostic [Max] Nordau and the pious Rabbi [Tzvi Hirsh] Kalischer. It was, by design, extremely elastic.

As such, Labor’s attempt to redefine Zionism with its own narrow political agenda is an affront to the very thing that has kept the movement vibrant and successful. And it’s more than a small slight: look deep in the heart of Zionism, and you’ll find a spiritual core that Labor’s current pronouncements have all but extinguished.

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.