Discussing the current state of Middle East scholarship, Martin Kramer explains what he believes to be the biggest source of American misunderstanding of the region, and of the Jewish state. (Interview by Lee Smith.)

Americans tend to assume that everyone wants democracy, and that more democracy is the solution for dysfunctional parts of the world. That’s no surprise: America has an admirable record in spreading it around the globe. But parts of the Middle East resist, and for good reason: democracy and its freedoms undercut the entire political, social, and moral order. So if you bring down a dictator, it’s not “mission accomplished.” It’s “mission complicated,” because you’ve unshackled all the genies that the dictator locked up, such as Islamism and sectarianism. . . .

[But] here’s the paradox. Americans sometimes forget that Israel really is a democracy, a vibrant one. Israel’s top leaders are sometimes faulted in America for not making “tough decisions” or taking “risks for peace.” But they’re politicians in a democracy; they answer to voters, and Israelis aren’t putty in anyone’s hands. There’s a lot of wisdom in the Israeli “crowd,” the common people. In almost every household, there are soldiers and reservists who know the realities surrounding Israel through first-hand experience. They’ve not just been brainwashed by a newspaper or a politician. The idea that someone can blindfold them and lead them to peace or war, or lure them away from democracy, is fundamentally misinformed.

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.