Louis Marano worked for over two decades as a journalist, and based his recent novel The Tribalist—about a non-Jewish journalist covering the Middle East—on his own experiences. Edward Alexander describes the book as “a love song by a Gentile journalist for the state of Israel.” He writes in his review:

In Marano’s novel, politics becomes primary and in fact more interesting than the romantic adventures and misadventures of the book’s protagonist, the reporter and columnist Frank DiRaimo, a barely disguised fictional version of the author. His first love is not really any of these women but the land of Israel and the people of Israel. He knows, almost by instinct, that Israeli Jews, including (if not especially) the secular ones, really belong to a community of faith.

He is powerfully impressed by young Jewish soldiers: “These young people were standing guard, protecting their tribe. Something about this was so elemental, so primal, that it stirred Frank’s soul. . . . He felt the presence of something precious that had been devalued, discarded, and finally redeemed. It was like discovering a unicorn on a lost island.”

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.