In February, the prominent French intellectual Alain Finkielkraut, an outspoken defender of the Jews and persistent critic of radical Islam, found himself recognized and then attacked by a small mob of Yellow Vest protestors, who shouted anti-Semitic epithets at him along with generic insults. Considering this incident as well as Finkielkraut’s work and thought, Paul Berman compares him with the turn-of-the-20th-century poet and essayist Charles Péguy, another man of the moderate left who stood up for the Jews. Péguy was simultaneously a devout Catholic, a defender of Alfred Dreyfus’s innocence, and a nationalist:

In Péguy’s view, the spiritual qualities of France—its mystique—arose from the entire history of the country, beginning with the kings and reaching a grand culmination in the French Revolution, with its principle of human rights and its aspiration for universal justice, which are the spiritual glories of the French republic. The glories in question, as applied to Captain Dreyfus, left no doubt as to his innocence. And the glories left no doubt that every good republican in France needed to defend the wronged and martyred victim; in sum, a patriotic love of France made Péguy a Dreyfusard.

He also sympathized with the Jews as a whole, and this was unusual. He knew that, during the dozen years of the Affair, the wave of hatred for the Jews in France was intense, and Jews of all economic classes, and especially the lower class, went through terrible experiences—lives and fortunes destroyed, careers ruined. . . .

He wrote: “I know this people well. There is not a spot on their skin that is not painful, where there is not an old bruise, an old contusion, a deaf pain, the memory of a deaf pain, a scar, a wound, a bruise from the East or the West.” He also noted that, in the eyes of the anti-Semites, Jews were powerful people who controlled the destiny of the world; and this belief made it impossible for a great many people to see the scars and the wounds. The Jewish suffering was wide and ancient and deep; and it was invisible. . . .

Péguy’s observation about the invisibility of Jewish suffering circa 1900 turned out to be applicable, as well, to Jewish experiences circa 2000. The persecutions expanded, and, for a good many years, they remained invisible to the national journalists in France, the government, the intellectuals, and even to the august notables in the Jewish elite, who, exactly as in the Dreyfus Affair, ought to have known better. The persecutions were visible to Finkielkraut, though, . . . and a few others.

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.