In his recent book, Chosen? Reading the Bible amid the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the distinguished scholar Walter Brueggemann levels familiar accusations against the Jewish state while also claiming that he has discovered heretofore-overlooked injustices. As for Brueggeman’s theological investigations, Gerald McDermott argues that they reveal the author’s contempt not for any particular Israeli behavior or policy, but for Zionism itself and for the promises of the biblical God:

Brueggemann makes not only [factual errors about the recent history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] but exegetical and theological ones as well. His most serious is the supersessionist mistake, which claims that the church supersedes Israel, so that for the New Testament authors God is supposedly no longer interested in the Jewish people or the land of Israel. . . . This is the . . . claim that most Catholic and Protestant theologians rejected after the Holocaust made them ask how the most Christianized country in Europe could have murdered six million Jews. . . .

Brueggemann’s real opponent in this book is Zionism, which claims that there is a connection between the Hebrew Bible’s promise of the land and the modern state of Israel. Brueggemann complains that Zionism “disregards the Deuteronomic if”—that Israel will control the land only if she lives up to the terms of the covenant. He suggests that modern Israel has not done so because of its “oppression” of Palestinians, and that the essence of Judaism has nothing to do with land anyway. “Judaism consists most elementally in interpretation of and obedience to the Torah,” which “can be done anywhere.”

This claim ignores what is central to the Hebrew Bible. As the great Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad put it, “Of all the promises made to the patriarchs it was that of the land that was the most prominent and decisive.” Land is the fourth most frequent noun or substantive in the Old Testament. . . . [W]hen the biblical God calls out a people for himself, he does so in an earthy way, by making the gift of a particular land an integral aspect of that calling.

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.