Speak to residents of the upscale neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, or browse any of Israel’s left-leaning newspapers and websites, and you’ll get a sense of what the journalist, broadcaster, and actor Yaron London calls the “sorrow of the left”—a sense of political despair combined with a fear that the Israel they love is slipping away. After discussing the subject with London, Peter Berkowitz comments:

London rejected the notion, [widespread among left-wing Israeli pundits], that freedom and democracy are under assault in Israel. While he is acutely worried about the growing gap between rich and poor, London insisted that freedom of expression here has never been more robust.

[But London pointed out that] demographic trends are working against the left. . . . [In addition], the violence and fanaticism in the Middle East have grown so terrible that the national-security platform of the center-left has become increasingly indistinguishable from that of the right.

[What’s more], the left has been unable to produce “a leader who can compete with Benjamin Netanyahu’s mix of intelligence, charisma, and skill in controlling public opinion.” . . .

In these gloomy circumstances, London observes, the question is not why the left is depressed but rather why the right is not. His answer goes to the heart of the matter.

Unlike America, where social and economic issues divide left and right, Israeli politics revolve around conflicting opinions about “the relation to Arabs, the borders of the country, and Israel’s character as ‘a Jewish and democratic state.’” . . . [C]ontrasting understandings of the Jewish people and Israel, he thinks, explain divergent responses by the left and right to their shared existential anxiety for Israel’s survival. . . .

In his assessment of the right, London may underestimate the extent to which liberal and democratic norms have spread, including among the extremely religious, just as in his account of the left he may neglect the rise of intolerance.

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.