Joann Sfar, a French Jew, has created a number of best-selling comic books, many of which—such as Klezmer and The Rabbi’s Cat—focus on Jewish themes and characters. Sfar has written that he loves Israel; he also believes French intellectuals are beset by a “neurosis about Israel and Palestine.” Yet his fiction bespeaks both an antipathy toward Zionism and a deep ambivalence about the Diaspora, as Michael Weingrad writes:

[W]hile Sfar sees Zionism as an understandable Jewish response to anti-Semitism, the state of Israel holds no attraction for him. The Rabbi’s Cat, for instance, concludes with a story in which the characters search for a fabled Jewish homeland in the wilderness of Africa. Apart from the cat, the two characters who reach this mythical Jerusalem are Marc Chagall and the African woman he falls in love with along the way.

They hope to find a place where they will be accepted—Jew and black, victims of anti-Semitism and European racism, respectively. However, the foreboding, Assyrian-esque city’s inhabitants—gigantic, blue-skinned, sword-and-magen-david-toting “Jews who have never left the land of their ancestors . . . happy, balanced people who radiate self-confidence”—expel Chagall and his wife. . . . It requires little interpretive effort to see this as Sfar’s portrayal of Israel, martial, oriental, and alien, and which he believes can offer no welcome to a cosmopolitan artist of European background, let alone one whose wife, like Sfar’s, is not Jewish.

[By contrast,] the final volume of Klezmer . . . dramatizes Sfar’s suspension between an anti-Semitism that makes life for Jews impossible in France and the forms of Jewish solidarity (Orthodoxy and Israel; religion and state) that he rejects. . . . To stay in Europe is to embrace a Judaism that is diasporic, European, cosmopolitan, progressive, and cultural rather than religious—all traits that he apparently believes cannot be found in Israel. Yet he recognizes that in choosing Europe one possibly chooses destruction. “In [earlier crises], the Jews who left Europe were wrong . . . yet their families survived,” he writes, while those who remained “and had the truth on their side . . . with rare exceptions died.”

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.