In 1946, President Truman, along with a number of Jewish organizations, urged Britain to allow Holocaust survivors living in displaced-persons camps to leave Europe for the land of Israel, then still a British mandate. In response, the British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, organized an Anglo-American committee of inquiry to interview Jewish and Arab leaders in Palestine and report on the situation, hoping to convince the U.S. of the impossibility of letting more Jews into the country. Norman Goda describes the telling testimony of the Arab interviewees:

Arab speakers attempted to straddle a moral line. Overt anti-Semitism was to be avoided. The Nazis, after all, had recently discredited racism. Instead, they attempted to turn the tables, attacking Zionism as an imperialist and racist political doctrine, very much akin to Nazism itself. Keeping the Jews from Palestine thus was painted as a noble act of tolerance in a post-imperial world. But the imagined line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitic tropes could not be maintained. . . .

The Cairo hearings in March 1946 were . . . carefully choreographed. Richard Crossman, a British member of the committee, would remember that “[the] Arabs were determined not to submit to the detailed cross-questioning which we had used in dealing with the Zionist spokesman. Their purpose was to deliver to the committee, as a ritual act, a statement of the Arab attitude, and to make it clear to us that this statement could not be modified. . . .” Thus Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia—a country where the Nazis had persecuted and murdered Jews just three years earlier—insisted that “[it] is for the Jews to change themselves, to change certain contentions that they hold which make them offensive sometimes to the locality where they live.”

[In hearings in Jerusalem], Ahmad al-Shuqayri, later the first chairman of the PLO, lamented Jewish control of the global media and economy: “We have not the gigantic financial enterprises of Wall Street in New York and the City of London to lure consciences and direct minds.”

In the end, the entire enterprise backfired: the American committee members became more convinced of the rightness of the Zionist cause, and pressured their British allies to sign a report recommending additional entry visas.

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.