Born in 1799 to a Sephardi family in the English city of Brighton, Moses Cohen took the somewhat less Jewish name of George Benjamin at the age of twenty-three and then set off for the U.S., where he settled in North Carolina. Not long after his marriage to a twelve-year-old Jewish girl, he brought his new family first to Toronto and then to the town of Belleville, some 100 miles to the east. Benjamin made little of his religion, but he also did not keep it a secret. Later, his conservative politics—which he had first embraced in England—would lead him to a career as a newspaperman and politician. Allan Levine writes:

Benjamin established Belleville’s first newspaper, the weekly Intelligencer, and he [eventually] made Canadian history twice. In 1836, he won election as a clerk of the Thurlow Township, encompassing the town of Belleville, . . . becoming the first Jew elected to a municipal office in Canada. And two decades later, in 1856, he was elected to the Province of Canada’s Legislative Assembly as a conservative supporter of John A. Macdonald, soon to be the first prime minister of Canada. . . .

Benjamin and [his wife] Isabella and their ever-growing family fit into the slow pace of life in Belleville. Their Jewish background was not conspicuous: it is unlikely that their sons were circumcised, and Isabella certainly did not keep kosher. The newspaper business provided Benjamin . . . with a modest living and a small-town visibility, which enabled him to become involved in municipal and provincial politics. As the paper’s publisher/editor, Benjamin was as partisan and spiteful as the custom of the day dictated. . . .

In April 1836, a group of critics who were angered by one of Benjamin’s editorials . . . hung him in effigy outside his office door. Benjamin was not troubled by this until John Barker, the editor and publisher of the Kingston British Whig, a newspaper [associated with the opposing Reform party], decided to have some fun at Benjamin’s expense. About a week after the effigy-hanging, Barker published a ditty titled “On the execution of the Belleville Jew.” . . . This was not the last time that a detractor would use his Jewish background to insult him.

Benjamin had a successful political career, and was even invited by the opposing party to be minister of finance. (He declined out of loyalty to the Conservatives.) He was baptized shortly before his death in 1864, most likely so that he could be buried in a church cemetery.

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.