Upon reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran, the administration dispatched Colin Kahl, national-security adviser to Joseph Biden, to reassure prominent American Jewish leaders about the deal. The choice of representative, argues Lee Smith, was a deliberate slight and a sign of the downgrading of U.S.-Israel relations:

Kahl was the administration official who removed the recognition of Jerusalem as capital of Israel from the 2012 Democratic platform. And it was as a scholar at the . . . Center for New American Security that Kahl floated a 2013 trial balloon hinting that the administration’s policy [toward Iran] was, contrary to President Barack Obama’s promises, not prevention of an Iranian nuclear bomb but containment and deterrence of it. As it turns out, this was the exact same policy Kahl outlined to American Jewish leaders last week, in what amounts in policy circles to a victory lap. . . .

But even if Kahl didn’t have a long personal history as the administration’s point man on the downgrade-Israel beat, the fact that President Obama sent the vice president’s aide to brief Jewish leaders on an issue of vital concern to them suggests how little the commander-in-chief now respects or fears the power of a community he once courted so assiduously. . . . [Y]ou can bet it didn’t take President Obama six years to comprehend the political import of James Baker’s famous observation about the Jewish community’s voting patterns. . . . The president could stick it to the Jews since they’d vote for Democrats no matter what.

President Obama was able to hammer away at AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby largely because the liberal segments of the Jewish community found it convenient to believe that the president’s target was just Benjamin Netanyahu, the stubborn and arrogant right-wing prime minister who drove decent people crazy. . . . What these community leaders seemed not to have fully understood is that American Jewish political power is linked not just to the financial power of Jewish donors or the influence of Jewish voters in a few key cities but more fundamentally to the strategic importance of the America-Israel relationship. What they certainly did not see is that tension with Bibi served President Obama very nicely in a much bigger strategic move, which was the main aim of the president’s Middle East policy since 2009: namely, to downgrade the U.S. alliance with Israel in order to make room for America’s new can-do regional partner, Iran.

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.