The great singer and celebrity maintained a longstanding affection for the Jewish state. He first visited Israel in 1962, but his support began much earlier, as Shalom Goldman writes:

In 1947 . . . Sinatra appeared at a benefit concert for the Zionist cause at the Hollywood Bowl. The event was titled “Action for Palestine.” A crowd of 20,000 wildly applauded their idol and called for approval of the partition plan then being deliberated at the United Nations.

The following year, at the request of Zionist leaders, Sinatra smuggled a large amount of money to operatives buying arms for the Haganah. . . . Teddy Kollek, then the Haganah representative in the United States, . . . had purchased a large arms shipment in New York and had to pay the ship’s captain to take it to Palestine. He knew he was being followed by federal agents. To evade them, Kollek asked Sinatra, who was performing at the Copacabana nightclub, to help him evade their surveillance. In Kollek’s words, “In the early hours of the following morning I walked out the front door of the building with a satchel, and the feds followed me. Out the back door went Frank Sinatra, carrying a paper bag filled with cash. He went down to the pier, handed it over, and watched the ship sail.” Years later Sinatra told his daughter Nancy that he did this for the Israelis because “I wanted to help, I was afraid they might fall down.”

Even after the Yom Kippur war, as Israel became increasingly unpopular in liberal circles, Sinatra’s loyalty endured.

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.