In December 2003, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced his plan to evacuate the IDF and uproot Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip, a policy to which he had earlier vocally objected. By early 2005, as the disengagement plan began to take shape, Israel’s left-leaning mainstream media abruptly dropped their habitual opposition to Sharon, instead deliberately adopting a policy of treating the prime minister, then under investigation on charges of corruption, with kid gloves—at least, Amnon Lord points out—until the disengagement was completed:

Amnon Abramovich, a veteran [Israeli] journalist and television commentator, called upon his colleagues in the media to unite and back Sharon to protect him from the potential negative consequences of the ongoing criminal investigations. . . . In a discussion [with] fellow leading journalists . . . at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem in February 2005, [Abramovich] exhorted his colleagues . . . “to protect Sharon . . . in a sealed box padded with gauze, cotton, and plastic wrap, at least until the end of the disengagement. . . . After that, we’ll reconsider.” . . .

In order to rally public support for the disengagement . . . after three-and-a-half years of ruthless attacks by a Palestinian terrorist enemy, a new enemy had to be created, the enemy within, namely the Jewish settlers in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Indeed, Abramovich admitted that he once had regarded Sharon as an “enemy.” Now, it was the settlers.

As Lord documents, the Israeli media largely followed Abramovich’s exhortations.

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.