To some, the political left appears to be a natural home for Jews; for others, it appears a source of endless betrayal, anti-Semitism, and hostility toward Israel. A recent book by Philip Mendes attempts to make sense of the history. David Hirsh writes in his review:

[W]hile a significant minority of Jews were influential within the radical left, a substantial majority of Jews remained outside of it. . . . A contemporary imbalance follows: while a large and influential proportion of left anti-Zionists are Jewish, only a very small percentage of Jews are anti-Zionists.

On the other hand, argues Mendes, the left, broadly conceived, did have a number of contact points with the wider Jewish communities. The left’s universalist tradition of equality coincided with the interest in emancipation of the Jews; many Jews in Europe and Russia were poor and the left championed the poor; there was a Jewish tradition of literacy and intellectualism which fed easily into the left and that attracted some Jews; Jews moved toward the towns and cities early and the left was a significantly urban movement; Jews often had an ambiguous place in relation to the identities of the emerging nationalisms among which they lived, as did the left, so notions of cosmopolitanism had the potential to become a shared value, as well as a source of particular hostility from the outside. . . .

When movements came to power in Russia and Eastern Europe which described themselves as socialist, they were also pioneers of state-imposed anti-Semitism; the experience of Nazism did little to inoculate Communist states against anti-Semitism, it only drove them to articulate it in slightly different formulations.

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.