The poet, essayist, and playwright Nathan Alterman (1910–1970) was read widely in Mandate Palestine and Israel in his own day, and remains so today. In 1952 he came to the U.S. to observe the presidential campaigns of Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson and even composed a poem about the two parties’ conventions, which he found to be exotic and even amusing. He focused his attention on the political habits of the Jews he met there, writes Shalom Carmy:

Alterman saw [the American Jew] shouting and cheering and valiantly trying to fit in. Yet there is something about him that doesn’t quite fit, an element of preoccupation or distance. Whence does this discomfort stem? Perhaps the American Jew is insecure because of his loyalty to his people, and particularly his Zionism. He dreads the suspicion that Gentile Americans will think that concern for his people means a lackluster commitment to America.

Yet Alterman doesn’t buy this analysis. Advocacy and boosterism for one’s ethnic group is typically American. Many Irish Americans have been militant for the Irish cause against Great Britain. Slavic-American neighborhoods in postwar America expected their politicians to fight against the Soviet enslavement of Eastern Europe, at least rhetorically if not in concrete actions. Precisely in this respect, the Jew is like other Americans.

No, says Alterman, the difference is this: the Jew may yell “I like Ike” and pump his fist and blow his whistle, but his real question is whether “Ike likes me.” This, he judges, is why the Jew looks like an outsider at the party, or, in the poet’s striking phrase, like an old man in a nursery school.

Carmy finds this position persuasive, but only after refining it somewhat:

[All] those who like Ike also want to be liked by Ike. But the ordinary American in the crowd doesn’t dwell on the difference between liking Ike and being liked by him. He cheers his candidate, and the candidate beams back at him. They are two sides of the same coin, sharing an unconscious but powerfully felt Americanism. Where the Jew differs, according to Alterman, is that in liking Ike (or Adlai) he can’t let go of his anxiety about Ike’s attitude to him. He is reflective, and to a degree anxious, where other citizens are largely confident in their reciprocal regard.

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.