In December, the British journal the New Left Review published a piece by its long-time editor Perry Anderson entitled “House of Zion,” calling for the destruction of Israel. Given the publication’s influence on the Western left, the article amounted to “the Marxist equivalent of a papal edict,” in the words of the editors of Fathom. Michael Walzer notes its author’s sympathy for violence and contempt for those who desire peace:

Whether [Anderson] favors a purely political or also a military fight, violence or non-violence, is unclear. He doesn’t talk about terrorism at all, though he hints at the usual apologetic account of it (“an explosion of frustration and despair”). His last paragraph seems to call for Arab states to threaten war against Israel (once they are in full control of their “strategic emplacements”). But his militancy is non-specific.

What is certain is that he has nothing but contempt for any Palestinian politician who isn’t actively engaged in “resistance.” All those who hope for mutual accommodation between Jews and Palestinians, who are ready to accept a state alongside Israel and to call for the end of the conflict, who are engaged in a common struggle against terrorists and religious fanatics, who are trying to turn the Palestinian Authority into a nascent state—these are the chief villains in Anderson’s story. The sentences about them are one long angry sneer: they are “compliant notables,” “placemen,” “cost-effective surrogates for the IDF,” bloated with “the proceeds of collaboration.” . . . Anderson is superior to all this. He says it’s war, and he wants them to fight.

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.