As its title suggests, Steven Beller’s Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (first published in 2007, now out in a revised edition) aims to condense a massive topic in a mere 150 pages. David Wolpe writes that, even as it succeeds impressively at this task, it makes a cardinal mistake about the nature of its subject:

Beller offers a concise and helpful tour of the modern history of Jew-hatred and how it took hold in different countries. Then in conclusion he writes, inexplicably, “What should be clear is that anti-Semitism is not a unique phenomenon any more, if it ever was, but is rather at base an extreme form of modern exclusivist thinking, with a logic shared by fundamentalisms and nationalisms that do not have Jews as their main targets.”

This appears to me exactly wrong. A people that is 0.2 percent of the world population, sometimes hated even in places where there are no Jews (as Beller notes about Japan), suspected of running the world in places as disparate as Kiev and Sun Valley, the survivors of a recent gargantuan effort to wipe them out because they exist, who today are targets of a worldwide campaign by jihadists, are indeed in a unique position. This hatred cannot be tamed by analysis or lassoed by reason. Anti-Semitism is the wild, irrational eruption of the world’s dark collective unconscious.

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.