Since the early 19th century, anti-Semites have argued that the true beneficiaries of liberal democracy and market economies have been Jews, and that Jews were ultimately to blame for the dislocation and social ills that accompanied modernization and the industrial revolution. Thus, well before Karl Marx wrote “On the Jewish Question”—in which he declared that “money is the jealous God of Israel” and called for “the emancipation of society from Judaism”—some prominent early socialists saw Jews as the manifestation of the problem they were committed to solving. Michele Battini, in his recent The Socialism of Fools, traces the history of these strands of thinking in West European socialism from its roots until the present day. Although his book sheds much light on this important and often forgotten piece of history, Ben Cohen finds that it also ignores some essential things:

The elephant in the room here is Battini’s treatment of the relationship between the anti-Semitic texts and movements which he analyzes and today’s expressions of anti-Zionism. Readers hoping for a substantive probing of these connections are advised to look elsewhere, although that isn’t necessarily a criticism. Battini is a historian, and the value of his book lies in his thesis that anti-Semitism was a core pillar of the anti-democratic and illiberal thought that flourished in the 19th century on left and right. But he does also choose to address the subject in its contemporary form, and what he has to say is so unsatisfying that one questions why he felt the need to include it at all.

The problem here is not just Battini’s mandatory nod to the “ferociously unjust” policies of Israel toward the Palestinians. . . . It’s that his overall argument is hasty and weak. . . . He avoids any meaningful examination of the role of the New Left in promoting this “new-old anti-Semitism,” and does not even pause to consider the meaning of the anti-Semitic terrorism carried out by non-Arab groups like the Japanese Red Army and Germany’s Red Army Faction during the 1970s.

Battini is correct when he concludes that anti-Semitism in our time revolves around the notion that “‘Judaism’ is power because Israel is an actual political power and because the American Diaspora is a financial power.” Expressed like this, we can perceive the continuity between the anti-emancipatory anti-Semitism of early capitalism and that which has crystallized in its current, globalized form. Yet his claim that Israel’s “[provocations] against the Arab populations of Palestine” act as grist to the mill of today’s propagandists is a lazy and commonplace argument—all the more so as the overall thrust of his book makes it clear that there was little correspondence between anti-Semitic theorizing and the actual behavior of Jews.

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.