The novels of Joseph Roth (1894–1939) capture with equal mastery the Galician shtetl, the aristocratic Austrian family, and war-torn Siberia. In addition to his many works of fiction, Roth produced a mass of journalistic writings, many of which have been newly translated into English by Michael Hoffman in a collection titled The Hotel Years. In his review, Frederic Raphael comments on Roth’s uncanny ability to see what was in store for Europe:

Roth was the first novelist to mention Adolf Hitler’s name in print, as far back as 1923. The view from the street, if not yet the gutter, allowed him to see it all coming. . . . [He possessed] a two-eyed vision of the collapse of what he called, in “Germany in Winter” (1923), “the regulating consciousness.” His realization that common decency was no longer a reliable social adhesive was first prompted by the sight, in the west end of Berlin, of

two high-school kids . . . arm in arm, like a pair of drunks, and singing:
“Down, down, down with the Jewish republic. Filthy Yids! Filthy Yids!”

And passersby got out of their way. No one stopped to slap their faces. Not out of political indignation. But because in any other country the irritation of a kid bothering the street with his half-baked politics would have provoked someone to a pedagogic measure. In Germany the convictions of high-school boys are respected. That’s how law-abiding people are in Berlin.

The piece, like many of those collected in The Hotel Years, appeared in the Frankfurter-Zeitung. Ten years later, its editorial board sang from the same hymn sheet as the wanton students. In the interim, Roth’s reportage, even on mundane occasions, carried the menace of the writing on the wall.

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.