The grandson of Sephardi immigrants to Britain, Daniel Mendoza (1765-1836) grew up in a Jewish enclave in east London where he developed a reputation for brawling. He first participated in a professional fight at the age of fifteen, and then rode the wave of boxing’s popularity in England, and his own success, to become something of a celebrity athlete—and a source of pride to his fellow Jews. Wynn Wheldon writes:

Daniel Mendoza was not merely a revolutionary boxer, not only a Jew who raised the status of his community, not only a natural entertainer; he was also a writer. His Memoirs, probably written in 1808 but not published until 1815, is a vital document in the understanding of Jewish assimilation into English cultural life. It is written in rounded, Augustan English, and the journey of his life is presented in picaresque terms. . . .

While his Jewishness is not prominent in the book, it is never skirted around or ignored. He was clearly proud of his faith, claimed to have learned Hebrew to a highish standard, married a Jewish wife, brought up his children as Jews, honored his father and mother. He knew how to make and bake Passover cakes. He invariably fought as “Mendoza the Jew” and was known as “the Light of Israel.” Such was his popularity and the respect he earned that in very few of the two-dozen or so prints depicting him is there a suggestion of malicious caricature. Certainly he is identified as a Jew, but not as an alien. . . .

It was—is—thought by many that Mendoza’s example made Jews less vulnerable to insult or attack, that his prowess tempered traditional stereotyping of Jews as cowardly or passive, that he contributed to the thinking that allowed Blackwood’s magazine to declare in 1817 that “the idea of a Jew (which our pious ancestors contemplated with such horror) has nothing in it now revolting.” In his retirement, Mendoza trained a generation of Jewish boxers who helped establish Jews as bona-fide Englishmen.

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.