Raised in a devout British evangelical family, Laurence Oliphant (1829–1888) had a successful career as a diplomat, intelligence agent, and foreign correspondent, despite his peculiar personal life and his involvement in various mystical religious movements. At one point he gave up a seat in parliament to join a cult-like sect in western New York with his family. Oliphant eventually embraced the idea of establishing a Jewish state in the Land of Israel. Unlike other early Christian Zionists, he cooperated extensively with the pre-Herzlian Zionist movement known as Ḥibat Tsiyon, traveling to Galicia and Romania to meet with Jewish leaders. Philip Earl Steele writes:

[Oliphant was well aware of] the fears of Great Britain that, following the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Russia—blocked from further expansion into the Balkans because of the emergence of the new states of Romania and Bulgaria—would now attempt to seize areas in the Levant from the Ottomans. Thus, combining his religious and imperial motives, [he] devised his “plan for Gilead,” presenting it as a way to solve Britain’s worries by establishing a Jewish colony under the protection of Great Britain.

[The plan] soon obtained the backing of Prime Minister Disraeli (a longstanding Zionist), and he in turn swiftly won over Foreign Minister Salisbury. In late November 1878 the three men met together to discuss the idea with the prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) at Sandringham, one result of which was that Oliphant received his [diplomatic] credentials. In February 1879 he set sail for the Levant on a mission George Eliot also expressed approval for.

Oliphant soon also met Vienna’s Peretz Smolenskin, the eminent Zionist activist who published the Hebrew-language journal Ha-Shaḥar (“The Dawn”). Smolenskin had been very favorably impressed with Oliphant’s plan for the Jewish colonization of Palestine, and in fact had presented it in Ha-Shaḥar the previous autumn. In Vienna, in the early spring of 1882, Smolenskin and the Oliphants became friends—Laurence Oliphant and [his wife] Alice even invited Smolenskin to travel on with them to Palestine in the aim of fostering the Jewish colonies anticipated soon to arise there.

Oliphant would enjoy the endorsement of the Zionist impresario David Gordon and even publish in his journal Ha-Magid (“The Preacher”). In time, Oliphant and his wife would settle in Haifa to pursue his Zionist endeavors and hire as his private secretary Naftali Imber, best known as the author of Israel’s national anthem. As Steele goes on to detail, Oliphant’s efforts paved the way for the founding of the early settlements of Zikhron Yaakov and Rosh Pinah.

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.