A number of historians and biographers have explained the famed Tory statesman’s invocation of his Jewish heritage, in his novels and elsewhere, as a way of making himself attractive to aristocratic figures through a connection with an exotic and in its own way noble Sephardi lineage. In his recent biography of Disraeli, the late David Cesarani attacks this claim and proposes another:

Disraeli’s Hebraic rhapsodies did not endear him to the aristocrats he was [supposedly] impressing with his Jewish genealogy and racial genius. On the contrary, they were offended by the claims made in [his novel] Tancred, irritated by his parliamentary speeches [in favor of expanding Jews’ political rights] in 1847, and outraged by [by ideas about Judaism and Christianity he put forward in his biography of his erstwhile patron] Lord George Bentinck.

By contrast, if they were not euphoric about his interventions, the Rothschilds [the Jewish banking family] were at least mildly flattered. A more credible explanation of Disraeli’s “Jewish explosion” is that it served as neither compensation nor consolation [for lack of aristocratic roots]; it was intended to make him appear more Jewish to get closer to the Rothschilds. . . . Such a tactic fits his pattern of behavior and requires no convoluted explanations or contorted chronology.

Disraeli’s approach to the Rothschilds was largely successful, although they never felt entirely comfortable with him. The nub of the problem was his attitude toward Judaism. When he did not directly denigrate their religion, he tacitly reproached them for not being Christians. The only way he could connect with them was by stressing their “racial” affinity. . . . [T]here was an inverse relationship between his devaluation of Judaism, inherited from his father, and his exaggerated claims for the potency and genius of the Jewish “race,” which [his father] Isaac would have deplored. Disraeli’s self-racialization was the curious solution to his dual identity: it enabled him to be a Jew and a Christian at the same time.

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.