Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate, is incensed by what he has read in Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land about a 1948 massacre, allegedly committed by the Palmah, in the Palestinian town of Lydda. As Martin Kramer has demonstrated, there is no evidence that such a massacre occurred—and yet Kinsley not only repeats Shavit’s claim but goes beyond it, accusing Jews of rewriting Israel’s past and adding ludicrous comparisons to the Rwandan genocide. Kramer writes:

[T]ake this point of supposed similarity between Lydda and Rwanda: “Crowding ‎people into a church (or, in this case, a mosque) and then blowing it up or setting it on fire.” ‎This originates in Shavit’s claim that Israeli troops detained Palestinian Arabs in a small ‎mosque, and then fired an anti-armor rocket into it as an act of revenge, killing 70 ‎persons.

Trouble is, to borrow Kinsley’s phrase, “all this is not even close to being true.” ‎Kinsley, far from showing himself a careful sifter of history, clearly has been seduced by ‎Shavit’s dramatic opera, mistaking it for history. And Kinsley then amplifies Shavit’s biases ‎still further, for reasons known only to him, producing a grotesque defamation of Israel that ‎goes even beyond Shavit’s account.‎ . . . To insinuate a parallel between the battle in Lydda and the most ‎heinous crimes against humanity, committed as part of a genocide, is simply obscene.‎

And it suggests that Kinsley didn’t even read Shavit carefully, for Shavit concludes his ‎account with this admission: “The small-mosque massacre could have been a ‎misunderstanding brought about by a tragic chain of accidental events.” But for Kinsley, ‎there are no accidents. He attributes a murderous intent to Israeli troops not because he can ‎be sure of it, but because it suits his forced narrative of Israeli sin.‎

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.