In November 1943, Robert Foot, the director-general of the British Broadcasting Company, instructed his reporters not to give too much attention to reports of the Nazi slaughter of Jews. David B. Green writes (free registration required):

[Foot] warned employees not to broadcast anything that might be designed “to correct the undoubted anti-Semitic feeling which is held very largely throughout the country.”

He was concerned . . . that any undue focus on the suffering of Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe might actually “increase rather than decrease the anti-Jewish feeling in this country.” Foot’s instructions . . . reflected a range of institutional attitudes in the United Kingdom toward Jews that ranged from the ambivalent to the downright anti-Semitic, as well as an unusually patronizing opinion of the general public. . . .

[A]side from a period of several months in 1942, when the fate of the Jews was allotted more attention in the British press, coverage for the most part remained laconic.

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.