The British journalist Julie Burchill has never shied away from expressing her sympathy for Jews and the Jewish state. Quitting the Guardian in 2004, she explicitly cited its anti-Semitism as the reason, and she later considered converting to Judaism. Unchosen, her new memoir about her relationship with the Jewish people, has its flaws, writes Benjamin Bilski, but also much of value:

Unchosen has been greeted with derisive reviews invariably missing what makes this book most interesting. The Jewish people have always been outsiders, both as a nation and in exile, and yet despite all the odds, Burchill’s fascination is not with minor cultural staples and bagels but with the undefined struggle.

[She writes that she is] “seeking an absence, a mystery, an unknowable something that happened centuries ago which resulted in a tribe of desert nomads surviving for four millennia—while every sucker, charlatan, and Sadducee attempted to eradicate them—to basically build the modern world.”

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.