This summer, Israel arrested Mohammad el-Halabi, the director of the Gaza division of the highly respected Christian charity World Vision, for funneling some $43 million to Hamas. Luke Moon explains why this news should not come as a surprise:

World Vision . . . has done more to undermine Christian support for Israel than any other organization. In the late spring of 1979, a group of influential Christian leaders, including [some of World Vision’s senior officials], met at LaGrange, Illinois for a conference entitled “Human Rights and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.” . . . The conference ended with the drafting of what would be called the LaGrange Declaration. Published in Sojourners magazine, it was signed by over 5,000 Christian leaders. The declaration . . . directly challenged what would eventually become commonly known as Christian Zionism. It was primarily directed toward fellow Christians who believe that the universal message of [the New Testament] did not nullify the particular promises God made to Israel.

The LaGrange Declaration also affirmed the anti-Israel position taken by many Christians in the Middle East, especially Palestinians. As the late Geries Kouhry, director of the World Vision partner organization al-Liqa, said, . . .“Christian Zionists are our first enemy. They are more dangerous to Palestinian Christians than the Israeli occupiers.” This hatred of Christian Zionism permeated World Vision and provided the foundation for its antagonism toward Israel. . . .

[Later], World Vision institutionalized its antagonistic position. In 1985, the U.S. senator and World Vision board member Mark Hatfield released his legislative director, Tom Getman, to join World Vision as its director of government relations. Getman headed up World Vision’s newly established Washington office. By 1985, the organization’s budget had grown to nearly $200 million and the group became a major recipient of grants from the U.S. government. Prior to joining World Vision, Getman and Hatfield were already involved in several initiatives opposed to Christian support for Israel. Hatfield’s former chief of staff, Wes Michaelson, had drafted the LaGrange Declaration, and Hatfield himself was a signer.

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.