In an essay on the life and career of Theodor Herzl—the man who founded the organized Zionist movement that would pave the way to the creation of a Jewish state—Joseph Epstein writes:

As a future nation, the Jews needed a land, a flag, a leader. Herzl came eventually to believe that only Palestine would satisfy the hunger of the Jews for a homeland. A flag was also needed: “If you want to lead a crowd you have to raise a symbol above their heads. I am thinking of a white flag with gold stars.” As for a leader, he of course was it. [About Herzl] the word charismatic [can be] used with precision. The charismatic leader, we know from Max Weber, has “a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.” Herzl qualified.

Psychological interpretations of the extraordinary character that was Theodor Herzl are perhaps irresistible. [His biographer] Ernst Pawel thought him manic depressive, but he wrote before that term was replaced by bipolar disease, a more serious affair in every way. [In his more recent biography], Derek Penslar, who disavows any attempt “to diagnose Herzl from beyond the grave,” nonetheless does precisely that, and holds that “Herzl’s psychological anguish nourished his political passion” and that “Herzl desperately needed a project to fill his life with meaning and keep the blackness of depression at bay. Zionism was that project, which contained, sustained, and inspired him.” Eschewing personal psychology, Amos Elon believed, as do I, that Herzl’s “courage derived from an unbounded, simple faith in the rightness and urgency of his cause.”

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.