Support for Israel is nowadays a bedrock principle for Republican politicians, but it was not ever thus. Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, for instance, both sought to move away from what they saw as their respective predecessors’ excessive favoritism toward the Jewish state. Identifying the presidency of Ronald Reagan as the decisive turning point, Tevi Troy traces the evolution of Republican attitudes:

[By the late 1970s, a] confluence of forces [was] remaking the Republican party. The growing evangelical support for Israel had its greatest impact in the South, fast becoming the GOP’s stronghold. And it coincided with Ronald Reagan’s eloquence in support of the Jewish state.

Reagan did not see eye to eye with the Israelis on every issue; he approved the sale of AWACS radar planes to Saudi Arabia in 1981, criticized the 1981 attack on Iraq’s reactor at Osirak, and was not supportive of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. But Reagan spoke and thought of Israel in a manner new to American presidents. He saw that Israel was a strategic asset to the United States in the struggle against totalitarianism. Reagan recognized the alignment not only of interests but foundational Judeo-Christian beliefs: “Israel represents the one stable democracy sharing values with us in that part of the world,” he said.

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.