The celebrated American soul musician Ray Charles visited Israel three times during his life. During the first, in 1972, he discovered that he was wildly popular in the Jewish state. So enthusiastic was his reception in Jerusalem that in his autobiography Charles recalled that “in 30 years on the road, I had never experienced anything like this.” Shalom Goldman writes:

During his two-week tour, Charles also visited former Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion at Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev. . . . Israel’s founding father was then eighty-seven years old. The meeting between the “King of Soul” and “the Old Man,” as he was known affectionately by Israelis, has been preserved on film, [so that today] we can hear the children of Sde Boker join Charles and Ben-Gurion singing “Hava Nagilah.” Ray then sang Stevie Wonder’s song “Heaven Help Us All” for Ben-Gurion and the kibbutzniks.

In 1976, four years after he had visited Israel, B’nai B’rith honored Ray Charles as its man of the year. Accepting the award at a dinner in Beverly Hills, Charles said, “Even though I’m not Jewish, . . . Israel is one of the few causes I feel good about supporting. Blacks and Jews are hooked up and bound together by a common history of persecution. If someone besides a black ever sings the real gut-bucket blues, it’ll be a Jew.”

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.