A number of commentators have noted that Jews in Western countries are increasingly voting for conservative parties and candidates; American Jews, however, have maintained their overwhelming preference for liberals. Evelyn Gordon argues that this is not because American Jews are different from other Jews, but because America is different from other liberal democracies:

[N]on-Jewish Americans are overwhelmingly pro-Israel. That certainly isn’t the case in Europe. And as an annual BBC poll shows, it isn’t even true in Canada and Australia, whose current conservative governments are staunchly pro-Israel. Consequently, Democratic politicians [in the U.S.] are rarely as anti-Israel as their counterparts overseas, because being anti-Israel is still bad politics in America . . . Nor does the American left’s animus toward Israel spill over into blatant anti-Semitism as often as it does in, say, Europe. So, for now, liberal American Jews still feel as if they can support the left without having to repudiate their Zionism or their Judaism—something that’s increasingly no longer possible overseas.

But even in America, that may not be true for long. . . . Thus, if American Jewish liberals don’t want to go the way of their counterparts overseas, . . . they need to mount an urgent campaign to convince their own political camp that any good liberal should also be pro-Israel. That’s far from an impossible case to make, since it has the advantage of being true. . . . But conservatives can’t do the job for them.

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.