Born Avraham Coen in the Greek island of Corfu in 1895, the writer later known as Albert Cohen spoke only the local Jewish dialect for the first five ears of his life. His family moved to Marseille when he was a child, and he went on to pursue a career as a lawyer. Before publishing his first book, a collection of poetry titled Paroles Juives (Jewish Words) in 1921, he had already publicly embraced Zionism, as Matt Alexander Hanson notes:

In the wake of the Balfour Declaration, . . . Cohen met Chaim Weizmann, whose support granted him the editorship of La Revue Juive. His writers included Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, and Albert Einstein. [Yet] Cohen never visited Israel, despite serving as a liaison for the Jewish Agency for Palestine and rallying for [Jewish] statehood in the prime of his diplomatic career.

That diplomatic career involved international law as it pertains to refugees and stateless persons. Cohen wrote a protocol on the subject that became Article 28 of the 1951 Geneva Convention, and he worked for many years at international organizations based in Geneva. Hanson notes:

Cohen’s contribution to international refugee law was his attempt to save Jews [deprived of ] citizenship. As early as 1929, he saw it coming. In his debut [novel], Solal, published in 1930, anti-Semitic crows in Geneva croak of danger in a xenophobic country where Jews were demonized . . . as an incomprehensible race of worms.

Cohen also used his fiction, including his most celebrated work, Belle du Seigneur, to expose

the emasculated sham of international organizations, whose art-deco opulence and chauvinistic classism he mocked in indisputably perfect French. . . . Cohen [depicts] League of Nations employees boasting of earning more than Mozart, making anti-Semitic jokes, and seducing compliant women in decadent halls on the way to sterile hearings.

In other words, not unlike the League’s successor, the United Nations.

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.