Born in New York in 1906 and spending his childhood in Ireland and most of his adulthood in Britain, William Joyce has the dubious distinction of being the last person hanged by the United Kingdom for the crime of treason. Joyce left Britain for Germany in 1939, a mere six days before Hitler’s armies invaded Poland, and remained there to broadcast English-language propaganda, the activity that earned him his death sentence. But his fascist sympathies began earlier in 1922, when he joined a pro-Mussolini group in England; in 1937 he left another group, the British Union of Fascists—in part because his anti-Semitism was too extreme even for its leaders—in order to establish the British National Socialist party. Robert Philpot tells his story:

As Martin Pugh writes in his book on British interwar fascism: “Increasingly consumed with a hatred toward Catholics, Communists, and Jews, Joyce saw fascism as the best means of prosecuting his crusade against his and the nation’s enemies.” These hatreds were fueled by a powerful sense of resentment stemming from his own multitude of personal failures. Joyce blamed his inability to complete his master’s degree, for instance, on a Jewish tutor who supposedly stole his research. His rejection for posts in the civil service and Foreign Office were similarly attributed to the malign power exercised by Jews and others.

Joyce’s growing power [in the British Union of Facists]—together with that of the former Labor MP John Beckett and the journalist A.K. Chesterton—accelerated the increasing emphasis the Union of Fascists placed on anti-Semitism. . . . . Joyce [would later] argue for an alliance with Hitler and war against the “twin Jewish manifestations” of Bolshevism and international finance.

Joyce was not entirely the political outsider he made himself out to be. Instead, he was involved with a string of shadowy groups, such as the Nordic League, the Link, and the Right Club, which were frequented by right-wing Tory MPs, members of the aristocracy, and former military officers.

Once in Germany, Joyce’s subversive wartime radio broadcasts—for which he adopted the name “Lord Haw-Haw”—earned him the praise of Joseph Goebbels and a large audience in the UK. After the war, he was identified and captured by the British soldier Geoffrey Perry, né Horst Pinschewer, a Jew who had fled the Third Reich in 1936.

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.