While attending the University of Berlin in the late 19th century, the African-American thinker W.E.B. Du Bois studied under the tutelage of the anti-Semitic historian Heinrich von Treitschke, and after returning to the U.S. occasionally deployed anti-Semitic stereotypes in his writings. By the second decade of the 20th century, however, he had rejected such ideas, as Harold Brackman writes:

Du Bois’s attitude . . . changed when he worked with Joel E. Spingarn, Henry Moskowitz, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Lillian Wald, and other Jews prominent in forming the NAACP. Zionism [also] provided a model for Du Bois’s own pan-African ideology: “The African movement means to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews,” [he wrote].

He condemned anti-Semitism in Poland and Hungary, as well as in Germany, and commended Albert Einstein. In May 1933, he editorialized about the dangers of Nazism, and [attending] Hitler’s 1936 Berlin Olympics, . . . decided that Nuremberg was worse than Alabama.

In 1940, Du Bois warned against African-American anti-Semitism, inflamed by German and Japanese propaganda. Despite initial doubts about America entering World War II, Du Bois remained steadfast in denouncing Hitler’s war against the Jews and supporting Zionism. As the Nazi war machine rolled east in June 1941, Du Bois joined African-American intellectuals like Ralph Bunche in warning of the threat of “a new slavery and barbarism, terrorism and darkness” engulfing the world.

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.