In its most recent anti-Israel op-ed, the New York Times hosts the philosophy professor Omri Boehm branding Zionism as inherently illiberal and racist, while dragging up distortions of history that have been subjected to numerous debunkings. The blogger known by the pen-name Elder of Ziyon writes:

Of course there is a tension between Zionism and liberalism, but that doesn’t mean that a Zionist state must be by definition illiberal, as Boehm claims. Zionism is not by any means “rooted in the denial of liberal politics.” This is an obvious lie.

Boehm then adduces a 1941 letter in which Avraham Stern, leader of a Revisionist Zionist splinter group, proposed cooperating with the Nazis to rescue Jews from Europe and bring them to Palestine. This Boehm declares a “sanctification of Zionism to the point of tolerating anti-Semitism.”

When this letter was written, Stern’s assumption was that Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews systematically, but [instead] to encourage them to leave Europe. It is truly obscene to describe Stern’s desperate effort to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the clutches of the Nazis as an inherent Zionist affinity with Nazism. In fact, Stern was known to . . . compare Hitler to [the genocidal biblical villain] Haman.

But Boehm is doing much worse than misrepresenting Stern. Stern’s offer to collaborate with Germany to save thousands of Jews was anomalous. From the right to the left, the Zionist movement opposed Nazi Germany from the beginning. . . . It is instructive that Boehm digs up this little-known episode as the paradigm of Zionism’s supposed affinity with anti-Semitism.

What do you call a man who generalizes about an entire group of people based on a troubling anecdote about a single member of that group? You would call him a bigot.
You would certainly not call him liberal.

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.