One of the most influential Protestant thinkers of 20th-century America, Reinhold Niebuhr also helped lay the theoretical foundations for the cold-war liberalism of the postwar decades. He was, moreover, a vocal supporter of Zionism since at least the 1930s, believing that Jews were entitled not just to rights as individuals, but as a nation. Indeed, even before coming to Zionism, Niebuhr had already broken from what was then accepted Christian thinking concerning the Jews. Shalom Goldman writes:

The seeds of Niebuhr’s philo-Semitism were planted in his childhood, . . . in the small midwestern town of Wright City, Missouri. There [his father, the German-born] Pastor Gustav Niebuhr of the German Evangelical Church began each day with readings in Hebrew and Greek from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. [Gustav] taught his five children the ancient languages and texts. . . .

In his Detroit congregation, in 1923, Pastor Reinhold Niebuhr preached about the necessity of increasing the numbers of Jews who join the Christian fold. . . . Yet Niebuhr would soon reconsider his position, influenced, he wrote, by his experience of the Detroit Jewish community’s commitment to “better the welfare of the poor, the unemployed, and those who suffered from racial discrimination.” . . . By 1926 Niebuhr had rejected completely the idea of a mission to Jews. As his biographer R.W. Fox noted, Niebuhr understood by this time that “Christians needed the leaven of pure Hebraism to counteract the Hellenism to which they were prone.” Niebuhr now argued forcefully that Christians had no business trying to convert Jews. . . .

In 1941 Niebuhr spoke at the annual convention of the B’nai B’rith organization. There he came out in favor of U.S. support for a Jewish state in Palestine. He repeated this call in a speech the following year to the leadership of the Reform movement, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. . . . In some matters Niebuhr [initially] aligned himself with the proposals of Brit Shalom, the group formed by Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, and Ernst Simon, [that] called for a binational state [in Palestine]. Yet while Niebuhr was attracted to the idea, he eventually deemed it “unrealistic.”

During the Suez Crisis [in the mid-1950s], Niebuhr’s was one of the few influential American Christian voices calling for unqualified support of Israel. As the Soviet Union supported Egypt with arms, Niebuhr felt that the United States should support Israel, for “the very life of the new nation of Israel is at stake.”

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.