In The Way to The Spring: Life and Death in Palestine, the American journalist and novelist Ben Ehrenreich serves up a familiar collection of anti-Israel slanders and half-truths, albeit in particularly slick packaging. Figuring prominently among Ehrenreich’s sources, and in the book’s narrative itself, are the Palestinian couple Bassem and Nariman Tamimi—the first people thanked in the book’s acknowledgments. They together with their extended family routinely conduct anti-Israel activities and extensively praise and encourage terrorism on social media. At least one member of the family has been involved in the planning of terror attacks. The question, writes Petra Marquardt-Bigman, is whether Ehrenreich is ignorant or just sympathetic:

Ehrenreich has long believed that “Zionism is the problem,” as he explained in a 2009 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times. When it comes to the methods the Tamimis support in order to solve this “problem,” it is certainly disingenuous to ask—as Ehrenreich does—if there is “no form of Palestinian resistance so innocuous that it wouldn’t be condemned.” There is absolutely nothing “innocuous” about the Tamimis’ ardent support for terror and their equally ardent Jew-hatred. . . .

To be sure, much of the more revolting stuff that the Tamimis put out is . . . written in Arabic [a language Ehrenreich appears not to know]; but the output of Manal Tamimi, who also features in [the] book . . . provides an easily accessible glimpse of the hatred and extremism that animates the minds of Ehrenreich’s chosen protagonists. . . .

Why Ehrenreich chose to transform a family of ghoulish terror fans and practitioners into exemplars of “generosity, hospitality, kindness, laughter, encouragement, insights, and wise counsel” is anyone’s guess: maybe he just liked them. . . . Ehrenreich’s decision to present the Tamimis as a model of lovingkindness may be a better choice than the family’s own narrative when it comes to appealing to Western readers and book reviewers, but it doesn’t speak particularly well for his integrity as a journalist. . . .

In the introduction to his book, Ehrenreich acknowledges that he was not trying to be objective—a curious claim to journalistic virtue. . . . Yet it is rather ironic that the author also decries the “exclusion of discomforting and inconvenient narratives.” There are certainly lots of very discomforting and inconvenient facts that he excluded in order to present the Tamimis as eminently likable people who are fighting for a just cause with admirable spirit and tenacity.

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.