A favorite trope of anti-Semites, especially on the left, is that there was an underlying affinity between Zionists and Nazis (both wanted to get Jews out of Europe), and that Zionists were somehow guilty of collaboration. Like so many libels, this one contains a grain of truth: the Zionist leadership negotiated with the Nazi regime to get permission for over 30,000 German Jews to come to Palestine. But in reality this was but a desperate measure on the part of the Yishuv to save some Jews when the world was closing its doors to refugees. Furthermore, explains Samuel Miner, Nazi Germany was not at all well-disposed to the establishment of a Jewish state, and was eager to kill Jews in the Middle East:

Between January and July 1942, Field Marshall Erwin Rommel led the newly formed Afrika Korps across North Africa toward the British-held Suez Canal. . . . [H]ad Rommel succeeded in capturing Egypt, an Einsatzgruppe [an SS mobile killing unit], created in order to murder the Jews of Palestine, would have been activated. In July of 1942, the unit, consisting of 24 men, flew to Greece. Had Rommel won the first battle of El Alamein, the unit would have been sent to Egypt and neighboring Palestine to conduct its genocidal project. . . . However, Rommel’s defeats . . . as well as the Allied landing in French North Africa prevented the spread of the Holocaust to Palestine. . . .

Remarkably, archival documents show that months after the defeat of Axis forces in North Africa, the Luftwaffe actually considered a proposal to bomb Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration in November 1943. This plan, proposed by Arab nationalist leader and Nazi collaborator Amin al-Husseini and supported by Heinrich Himmler’s Reich Main Security Office [which controlled the SS and administered the Holocaust] was turned down in summer of 1943 by Hermann Göring, [who was commander of the Luftwaffe]. . . .

[However], the Luftwaffe did consider . . . bombing [Palestine] in 1943, and again in 1944. By then, there were no Axis forces operating anywhere near the Middle East. Furthermore, Luftwaffe planners openly admitted that there were no major industrial targets in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or Haifa. The position paper [advocating the bombings] concluded that “Tel Aviv is undoubtedly a place where we can consider retaliating against the British-American terror bombing [of Germany].” This sentiment reflected the Nazis’ conspiratorial worldview, . . . as they believed Jews were in control in London and Washington, as well as Moscow. . . . The Nazi war against the Western powers and the Soviet Union was a war against the 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.