In the years following World War II, MIT’s economics department became one of the most important in the world, pioneering the field now known as macroeconomics. Theories of how MIT came to play this role abound; according to one, the university’s openness to Jews had something to do with it, as David Warsh writes:

[T]he rise of MIT stemmed [in part] from its willingness to appoint Jewish economists to senior positions, starting with [Paul] Samuelson himself [who became a professor there in 1940 and helped recruit many other influential faculty members]. Anti-Semitism was common in American universities on the eve of World War II, and while most of the best universities had one Jew or even two on their faculties of arts and sciences, to demonstrate that they were free of prejudice, none showed any willingness to appoint significant numbers until the flood of European émigrés after World War II began to open their doors. MIT was able to recruit its charter faculty—Maurice Adelman, Max Millikan, Walt Rostow, Paul Rosenstein-Rodin, [Robert] Solow, Evsey Domar, and Franco Modigliani were Jews—“not only because of Samuelson’s growing renown,” writes [the economist E. Roy] Weintraub, “but because the department and university were remarkably open to the hiring of Jewish faculty at a time when such hiring was just beginning to be possible at Ivy League Universities.”

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.