Born in 1798 to a respected Quaker family in Pennsylvania, Warder Cresson was attracted as an adult to various new Protestant sects, and took an especially keen interest in the Hebrew Bible. In 1844 he set off for the Land of Israel, having secured the position of American consul to Jerusalem, although by the time he arrived he found a letter revoking the appointment. Alan Dowty tells his story:

[In the 1840s Cresson] was drawn increasingly to Judaism, coming into contact with Rabbi Isaac Leeser of Congregation Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia, an important Jewish leader of his time. . . . Like most devout Christians, Cresson read the Old Testament (that is, the Jewish Bible) closely; unlike most, he came to feel that it was definitive and [more authoritative than] the Christian scriptures that came later. [While] Cresson embraced the goal of the Ingathering of the Exiles, he rejected the attendant notion that this required Jews to convert to Christianity. . . .

In March 1848, after nearly four years in Jerusalem, Cresson converted to Judaism and took the name Michael Boaz Israel ben Avraham. Dowty continues:

Cresson returned to Philadelphia in September of the same year, eager to bring his family into [his new faith]. But his wife . . . and most of his family, claiming that Cresson was clearly out of his mind, lodged a charge of lunacy and obtained a verdict of insanity from a sheriff’s jury.

Cresson appealed the verdict and remained unconfined pending trial, which took place two years later, in May 1851. . . . Cresson’s lawyer argued that the basis of the lunacy claim was what would today be called anti-Semitism, [accusing Mrs. Cresson of] “endeavoring to stigmatize the venerable faith of Israel.” In his charge to the jury, the judge instructed them not to take religious beliefs into account in determining whether Cresson was insane. Accordingly, the jury took very little time to declare Cresson sane. The case was widely publicized at the time and the outcome was applauded by most major newspapers. It is considered a landmark in the defense of religious liberty.

Cresson, unsurprisingly, divorced his wife. He quickly returned to Jerusalem, marrying a woman in the Sephardi community and fathering two children (neither survived beyond childhood). . . . In his later years he tried to further pre-Zionist Jewish settlement by building an agricultural colony in the Valley of Refaim, the area later developed as Jerusalem’s German Colony. But it appears that he was never able to raise the necessary funds.

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.