Einat Wilf—an Israeli scholar-turned-politician-turned-public intellectual—has recently released a volume of her collected essays. Titled Winning the War of Words, it addresses the challenges currently faced by the Jewish state, including the difficulty of defending Israel’s moral rightness in the face of misinformation and demonization. In his review, Matti Friedman has much praise and one caveat:

I have my doubts about [one] of Wilf’s observations about intellectual efforts on behalf of Israel: “while victory in this battle [to defend Israel], as in others, is not likely to be swift, with the proper resources, organization, and determination it is within reach.” I don’t think this is the case, just as I don’t think that eloquent explanations in the 1920s could have convinced Germans that Jewish bankers were not manipulating the financial markets for their own devious gain, or that skillful essays or speeches could have countered the idea in capitalist countries that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot. No “war of words,” however “skillful,” can defeat the anti-Jewish obsession that crops up with unfortunate regularity in world history, of which today’s anti-Israel fixation is merely the most recent incarnation.

Explanations of Israel’s complexities in the real world will have a limited effect not just because they are necessarily complicated, but because the Israel obsession—in the manner of obsessions—isn’t really about Israel at all, or about the real world. These pathologies can perhaps be tempered on the margins but cannot be made to go away.

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.