In a series of panel discussions and debates while on a recent tour of Jewish communities in North America, Daniel Gordis encountered quite a few who claimed to be “pro-Israel” and “profoundly committed to Israel’s security” but who immediately went on to voice a list of complaints about the Jewish state, mostly focused on Benjamin Netanyahu, settlements, and the status of the West Bank. Many, including writers and some of American Jewry’s “most significant thought leaders in their 30s and 40s,” pointed out that their positions on these issues are shared by a significant portion of Israelis. Suspecting an element of insincerity in their protestations of love, Gordis proposes a litmus test that can be applied to critics of the Jewish state:

If a young American Jewish person were to read everything you’ve written about Israel, what would they encounter? How much is about the occupation or checkpoints, and how much is about Israel’s extraordinary accomplishments, its hardy democracy, and its history of pressing for peace? What portion of your corpus addresses the undeniably anti-modern and even anti-Zionist chief rabbinate, while how much is devoted to new Israeli explorations of Jewish meaning and belonging? To what degree does your written record alert your readers to the richness—but also the soul-searching—that is key to much of contemporary Israeli literature?

This matters because [Diaspora Jews] cannot move the policy needle. [Their] collective writing and speaking in North America is not going to affect Israel’s policy one iota. The needle that we can move is the “devotion needle”—we have the capacity to get young people either to embrace the extraordinary phenomenon that is Israel, or to walk away in anger. . . .

Yet many [writers who claim to be loving critics of Israel] produce work that is almost exclusively about bashing Israel, never reflecting on the much that is good about the Jewish state.

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.