AIPAC holds its annual conference next week and, as it does every four years, has invited presidential candidates from both parties to speak. Donald Trump is among those who accepted the invitation. While many Jewish leaders, activists, and journalists have called on AIPAC to disinvite him, Jonathan Tobin contends that the organization must stick to its usual policy of bipartisanship:

AIPAC can’t afford to write off either party. Its job is to fight for support for Israel on both sides of the aisle, and it has been largely successful in that effort even in an era where many rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly likely to be hostile or indifferent to it. . . .

[I]t’s important to understand that AIPAC as an organization—as opposed to what some of its members think—must do its best to stay away from partisan warfare. Expecting it to fight other battles is a formula for its dissolution, not one that can save its soul. Once it starts down that path, there will be no stopping.

Of course, some on the left would like nothing better than to see AIPAC dissolve or be weakened. That cannot be allowed to happen. The lobby will continue to play a responsible role in speaking up for Israel no matter who wins in November. But, as they always have, its members are free to speak out as they like about the candidates.

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.