Born in what is now Ukraine, Rabbi Baruch Korff, who died twenty years ago, spent most of his life in America. During World War II, he served as the director of the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People, an organization dedicated to rescuing Jews from Nazi-controlled Europe. He also became a confidant of President Nixon, whom he defended to the bitter end. Robert Philpot writes:

Not for nothing had Nixon introduced Korff to Chicago’s mayor as “my rabbi” earlier that spring. For, during the dying months of his presidency, Korff had emerged as Nixon’s most full-throated supporter. The previous autumn he had launched the National Committee for Fairness to the Presidency, which was committed to reaffirming “our faith in God and country, in constitutional government, in the presidency, and in our beloved president.” Its full-page newspaper advertisements were no less effusive, charging that Nixon’s media enemies had “scandalized him, brutalized him, [and] savaged him day after day, night after night.” . . .

[U]nlike many of the Jews who voted to re-elect him in 1972—when Nixon captured the second-highest share of the traditionally Democratic Jewish vote in the previous 60 years—Korff seemed prepared to give the president a pass. After [Korff’s] death, his daughter said her father “felt a kinship to Nixon in no small part because of his aid to Israel.” That sentiment was justified. In October 1973, when Israel faced an existential threat, Nixon was consumed by Watergate. With the Soviets flying arms into Egypt and Syria, Nixon’s aides debated how they could aid their ally without antagonizing the Arab states who had already imposed an oil embargo. Nixon took charge and, with the command “do it now,” ordered the Pentagon to start resupplying Israel’s depleted forces.

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.