In January 1957, National Review, then less than a year old, published a letter by Leo Strauss denouncing what he saw as the magazine’s anti-Israel stance and arguing that conservatives ought to support the Jewish state. Steven B. Smith extracts some important lessons for dealing with present-day assaults on Israel’s legitimacy:

Revealingly, Strauss never invokes the Holocaust as the reason for Israel’s existence. He refuses to treat causes that either highlight Jewish weakness or appeal to European guilt. If Israel is to stand, it must stand on its own two feet, that is, from sources within its own tradition.

The best reply to the deniers and delegitimizers is a serious engagement with the founding texts of Zionism—Theodor Herzl, Max Nordau, Aḥad Ha’am, Vladimir Jabotinsky. These are to Israel’s lifeblood what the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers are to American self-understanding. Strauss points to the conditions of human dignity that can be attained only by a self-governing people capable of determining their fate while remaining loyal to their heritage. Israelis and, just as important, Americans trying to defend Israel must never shrink from this task.

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.