Taking as their point of departure a graffito in a bohemian neighborhood of Leipzig reading “Fick Israel—Fick die U.S.A.”—a slogan that needs no translation—Andrei Markovits and Heiko Beyer argue that hatred of the U.S. and hatred of Jews (sometimes in the polite form of hatred of Israel) are not only deeply interconnected for the far left and far right today but have been so since the 19th century. They write:

[Such] terms as [the German] Amerikanisierung and [the French] américanisation invariably imply cheapening and loss of authenticity as in the Amerikanisierung of soccer, of food, of music, of language, of whatever. Américanisation also entails a corrosive dimension, something that ruins an item’s . . . original bliss and genuineness. In addition, there is a sense of inevitability to this process, a kind of helplessness befalling the victims of Americanization, a loss of agency in the face of this all-powerful onslaught that breeds resentment.

This same mindset pertains to anti-Semitism as well. Jews, just like Americans, are also seen as corrosive, as undermining an entity’s authenticity, as subverting its original purity. Both Jews and Americans are deemed to be particularly powerful even though they are almost always considered culturally inferior and somehow artificial, most assuredly inauthentic.

The attribution of an almost-limitless power to the United States constitutes one of the key links between anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. Israel is perceived as an American outpost, the sole Goliath in the Middle East (somehow other regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia have never been subjected to anywhere near the opprobrium that Israel has received in the past 50 years), against whom the Palestinian David is desperately and honorably taking a stand. At the same time, the notion of unlimited power attributed to the United States reveals another dimension: the affinity of anti-American conspiracy theories with anti-Semitic narratives, although it is hard to tell whether today’s anti-Americanism in some parts of the world derives from anti-Semitic beliefs or the other way around. . . .

To be reviled [today] by left-liberal intellectuals, one needs to be both politically and militarily powerful, but judged to be culturally inferior—requirements that the United States fulfils perfectly. Ditto with Israel. By constructing the former as an all-powerful white colonizer, [these intellectuals have made it] an acceptable object of derision and hatred. . . . Not so—or not yet—for Jews, who by dint of the Holocaust are still perceived as victims. [However], the fashionable anti-Zionist discourse that has become de rigueur among trade unions, churches, left-liberal parties, and social gatherings has entered a slippery slope toward anti-Semitism which, of course, all its practitioners deny with vehemence by accusing those holding this view as acting in open bad faith, driven by their maniacal desire to cover up the magnitude of Israel’s crimes. . . .

Indeed, Beyer’s research has shown that, from Pakistan to Spain, anti-Semitism correlates quite closely with anti-Americanism.

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.