The prominent journalist James Fallows has made a habit of complaining whenever Jews mention the Holocaust. James Kirchick attempts to figure out why:

Fallows’ annoyance at receiving letters from fearful Jews is matched by his confidence that the current situation in the Middle East bears no relation whatsoever to the fact that the Jews of Europe were exterminated en masse in living memory while the rest of the world . . . did nothing to stop it. . . . . “Rationally these situations have nothing in common—apart from the anti-Semitic rhetoric,” [Fallows] wrote on March 3, casually writing off the [Iranian] mullahs’ frequently expressed anti-Semitism, and their suborning terrorist organizations that wage war on Jews both inside and out of the Jewish state, as just so much talk. . . .

Fallows’ argument has the odd effect of demanding that Jews treat what are obviously serious and heartfelt threats as though they aren’t serious at all—a demand that it is hard to imagine Fallows or anyone else making of any other group that had any practical or historical cause to feel threatened. Instead of being a reason why Jews might legitimately be scared, the Holocaust is perversely transformed into a reason why Jews—alone among all other groups of people on the planet—should rise above petty concerns about their own “existential” chances, or else become the targets of Fallows’ annoyance. . . .

Interestingly, there are some people whose obsessive invocations of the Holocaust are fine with Fallows. In 2013, he rose to the defense of Max Blumenthal, author of a book about Israel that depicts Jews as Nazis and their state as akin to the Third Reich. Asked about such comparisons at an event, “Blumenthal’s answer was that he used these terms purposefully, to draw the universals from the ‘never again’ message of the Holocaust,” Fallows wrote approvingly. . . . Fallows is fine when the likes of Max Blumenthal invoke the Holocaust as a means of calling Jews the new Nazis; he just has a problem when Jews mention it in conjunction with Iran, or in any other connection that might impede the Obama Administration’s Middle East policies.

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.