A recent article in New York magazine argued that the billionaire Sheldon Adelson is largely responsible for the Republican party’s current pro-Israel stance. David Bernstein objects:

[P]utting aside the question of whether GOP support for Israel is truly “unconditional and unquestioning,” [as the article states], the person most responsible for making support for Israel a core Republican issue is Osama bin Laden, with a supporting role played by Yasir Arafat. Gallup polls from the past 25 years show that Republicans were already leaning somewhat more in favor of Israel in early 2001 than were Democrats. . . . This reflected the increasingly strong influence of pro-Israel evangelicals and national-security hawks in the Republican party, on the one hand, and the hostility or ambivalence of what was once known as the “McGovernite” wing of the Democratic party, on the other.

But the difference in partisan attitudes accelerated after 9/11. Relative support for Israel unsurprisingly went up among both Democrats and Republicans. September 11 made Americans more sensitive to Israel’s terrorism-related security concerns, and Arafat’s decision to continue and accelerate the second intifada—replete with bus, café, and synagogue bombings—was hardly likely to endear the Palestinian cause to Americans after 9/11. But these factors had a greater influence on Republican opinion than on Democratic opinion. . . .

In short, you have a Republican party in which 80 percent of the grass-roots membership supports Israel, and a significant percentage of that 80 percent considers it a litmus-test issue. Meanwhile, the current Democratic administration has engaged in open rhetorical warfare against an Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu, whom Democrats tend to loathe and Republicans tend to admire. Under those circumstances, . . . it’s really not possible . . . to imagine any scenario other than the GOP, and all its major presidential candidates, offering Israel strong support.

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.