Born to a Jewish family in Austria-Hungary in 1900, Muhammad Asad (né Leopold Weiss) converted to Islam in 1926. He went on to become one of the most influential Islamic thinkers of the 20th century, writing theoretical treatises on Islam and politics and advising the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Later he withdrew from political life to focus on scholarship, writing an English translation of the Quran that remains in use today. Unsurprisingly, he became a Muslim out of antagonism to Zionism and Judaism, as Shalom Goldman writes:

Weiss visited [Palestine prior to his conversion]—but it seems that nothing in Zionist activity appealed to him. Quite the contrary, Zionism and its followers repelled him, and his articles to that effect in the German and Austrian press further distanced him from his Jewish co-religionists in general and from his family in particular. . . .

Asad’s conversion to Islam in 1926 was linked to his rejection of Zionism. He saw Zionism as “tribal” and connected it with colonialism. In his later writings Zionism is depicted as an aspect of the “chosen-people” concept, a concept Asad often mentions with derision in his Quran commentary. For Asad, Islam is “universalist” and Judaism is “particularistic.”

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.