Up until the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the New Left in Western Europe and America maintained an ambivalent attitude toward Zionism; thereafter, it embraced the anti-Zionism of the Soviet Union and other Communist governments. Jeffrey Herf explains East Germany’s continuous record of hostility to Israel, the adoption of the same attitude by the radical Left in West Germany following the Six-Day War, and the anti-Semitism that persisted just below the surface in both countries:

One striking feature of both the East German Communist regime and the West German radical Left was a kind of obliviousness to the similarities between older anti-Semitic stereotypes of evil and powerful Jews and the attacks on Zionism and Israel as inherently aggressive, racist, and even exterminatory. . . .

[Another] distinctive feature of the secular leftist antagonism to Israel, first in the Soviet bloc and then in the global New Left, was the indignant assertion that it had absolutely nothing to do with anti-Semitism. Yet the eagerness with which Israel’s enemies spread lies about Zionism’s racist nature and their willingness to compare the Jewish state to Nazi Germany suggested that an element of anti-Semitism was indeed at work in the international Left as it responded to Israel’s victory in June 1967. . . .

[L]eftist Holocaust inversion [link to Kramer] rested on very old and false [claims] of enormous power and great evil that religious and secular anti-Semites had attributed to the Jews. Rather than acknowledge that the Jews, like any other nation with a state of its own, had defended themselves against a real threat and won a war, the Communists and the radical Left applied to the state of Israel the negative [stereotypes] once applied to the Jews of Europe. While anti-Semites before 1945 had described the Jews as the center of a powerful international conspiracy, the anti-Zionists of the cold-war era described Israel as the spearhead in the Middle East of a conspiracy led by the U.S. and supported by West Germany. . . . In the aftermath of the Six-Day War, the idea of the powerful and evil Jew, so familiar in the history of European anti-Semitism, assumed a new form of a powerful and evil Israel.

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.