In 1983, the American Jewish musician, who turned seventy-five yesterday, composed and recorded a song about the Jewish state, entitled “Neighborhood Bully.” While the song was written in the context of Israel’s war in Lebanon, the lyrics remain relevant. Gabe Friedman writes:

The [song] equates Israel with an “exiled man,” who is unjustly labeled a bully for fending off constant attacks by his neighbors. Dylan released the song on his second studio album, Infidels, in the wake of his brief born-again-Christian phase during the late 1970s and early 1980s . . . :

Well, the neighborhood bully, he’s just one man
His enemies say he’s on their land.
They got him outnumbered about a million to one.
He got no place to escape to, no place to run.
He’s the neighborhood bully. . . .

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized.
Old women condemned him, said he should apologize.
Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad.
The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad
He’s the neighborhood bully.

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.