In the CIA’s early years, the agency’s Middle East policy focused on opposing both Communism and Zionism. The main architect of this policy was Kermit Roosevelt (grandson of Theodore), who, like many of the CIA’s founding figures, belonged to “a fading patrician class of American Protestants—with deep ties to elite universities like Harvard and Yale, and to missionaries with connections throughout the Middle East.” Asaf Romirowsky explains the strategy, and its latter-day legacy:

In 1948, Roosevelt and leading anti-Zionist Virginia Gildersleeve, a former dean of Barnard College, had formed the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land, which warned that “extreme Zionist pressure” was in “danger of disruption of our national unity and encouraging anti-Semitism.” The group worked in close coordination with the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, and with State Department officials. Roosevelt kept forming [other] anti-Israel groups, such as 1949’s Holy Land Christian Committee, ostensibly to assist Christians in Israel. . . .

[This history] helps explain how modern NGOs’ evergreen anti-Zionist views remain cornerstones today, along with the convenient core belief that all Middle East problems reside in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Characterizing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other Zionist groups as the center of a nefarious “Israel lobby” is also not new.

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.