Hillary Clinton’s emails, now being released to the public in batches, contain correspondence with her longtime adviser and confidant Sidney Blumenthal—whose son, Max, is the author of a book of anti-Israel libels that calls for the destruction of the Jewish state. The emails, argues Jonathan Tobin, suggest that the U.S.-Israel alliance is unlikely to flourish if Clinton were to become president:

[W]hat wasn’t clear until today was the extent to which the person whom [Hillary Clinton] has publicly described as a close personal friend was counseling her to distance herself from pro-Israel groups and filling up her email account with anti-Zionist and other left-wing screeds by his son Max that she had printed out for further reading. . . . [T]he Clinton White House political hit man had plenty to say about just about every foreign-policy issue, and the former first lady was eager to hear all of it.

Yet the topic about which [Sidney] Blumenthal seemed to have the most passion was his attempt to steer Clinton away from the sort of pro-Israel stands that she had established while in the Senate. Blumenthal urged her to give “tough love” to Israel. That’s a nice way of saying that he wanted her to lecture and threaten it to bow to the Obama administration’s dictates even if they undermined the alliance between the two countries and Israel’s security. . . .

The assumption has been that if Clinton were elected, the damage done to the U.S.-Israel alliance by Obama would begin to be undone. . . . But so long as Sidney Blumenthal, and by extension his son Max, are going to be treated as valued voices within the Clinton camp, Hillary’s pose as a defender of Israel is no longer credible. She may not go as far as they would like in distancing herself from the pro-Israel community. But the notion that she will restore the closeness Obama wrecked is obviously untrue.

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.