Surveying the work of the spy novelist, Nick Cohen notes the corrosive politics found in both his work and his public statements. The latter, writes Cohen, reflect all of the worst tendencies of Britain’s old right and new left—including their “Jew obsession”:

Connoisseurs of [le Carré’s] public statements can tick every space on the bingo card. Le Carré believes that corporations brainwash the bovine masses (check) on behalf of the imperial American hegemon (check), which is itself controlled by a conspiracy of right-wingers (check), who are pulling our puppet strings at the behest of—guess who?—the Jews (full house!). Or as le Carré explained, the [Jewish] neoconservatives are “appointing the state of Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global policy.”

Then there is the self-pity, that most deplorable affectation of Western intellectuals who have never once faced the smallest threat of persecution or punishment for their writing. At one point during the last decade, le Carré compared himself with the German-Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, who miraculously survived life under the Nazis. Liberals of a certain age remember that when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s assassins imitated the Nazis and threatened Salman Rushdie’s life, the Klemperer-of-our-time opined that Rushdie had brought death on himself by insulting the great religion of Islam.

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.