Born in London in 1864 to immigrant parents, Israel Zangwill was a popular author of novels, stories, plays, and essays on both Jewish and non-Jewish themes. He became a leading proponent of Zionism in its early years, but broke with the movement to found one devoted to establishing a Jewish homeland somewhere other than Palestine. He also wrote an immensely popular mystery novel entitled The Perfect Crime, now re-released by HarperCollins. Jenni Frazer writes:

[A]nyone acquainted with the crime and thriller genres is certain to be familiar with Israel Zangwill. His modestly titled book, The Perfect Crime (later re-titled The Big Bow Mystery), is renowned throughout the world of detective fiction as the first full-length “locked-room” mystery novel. A man with no apparent enemies is found dead in a locked room—and the police can’t figure out “whodunit” or, more to the point, how. . . . The Perfect Crime, like many of Dickens’s novels, was serialized in the newspaper over just two weeks, causing hundreds of readers to write in offering their own solutions. . . . Zangwill’s follow-up to The Perfect Crime was his 1892 novel, Children of the Ghetto, which won him international acclaim.

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.