In an essay published earlier this year, the American political philosopher Michael Walzer strongly criticized his left-wing comrades for their blindness to the dangers of Islamism. In a recent discussion with a group of British thinkers and activists, he was asked why the left seems paralyzed by a fear of “encouraging Islamophobia” while having no such qualms about encouraging anti-Semitism. His reply:

[T]he fear of Islamophobia is related to the hostility to Israel. There is this eagerness— I’ve heard this often in America, I don’t know if it happens [in Britain]—to describe the Islamic minority in the U.S., or in Europe, as the “new Jews.” Somehow, that gives you license to ignore the “old Jews,” and to focus on these “new Jews,” and to claim that we must not repeat with them what we did to the “old Jews.” But that can lead to any criticism being interpreted as hostility to this minority and a way of targeting this minority. The argument becomes “if you are critical of Islam, you are joining hands with the new xenophobes of the West.”

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.