In a recent interview, the president discussed his nostalgia for the Israel of “kibbutzim, and Moshe Dayan, and Golda Meir,” an Israel which, he claimed, saw Zionism as a project of “remaking the world.” He would make similar remarks in his address to the Adas Israel synagogue in Washington. David Bernstein notes that this translates to nostalgia for a less diverse Israel:

The Israel of kibbutzim, Dayan, and Meir was perhaps a more idealistic, and certainly a more socialist, Israel. But it was also an Israel dominated by a secularized, Ashkenazi elite.

Mizraḥim (Jews from Arab countries), though more than half the population, were marginalized at every level of society. Discrimination was to a large extent institutionalized; the governing Labor party was run by socialist Ashkenazim, and given that state capitalism dominated the Israeli economy, one’s political and social connections went a long way toward determining one’s economic prospects. The kibbutzim in particular were a font of anti-Mizraḥi chauvinism.

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.