According to a pervasive academic narrative, many journalists, and the rhetoric of the Obama administration, the woes of the Middle East since World War II have been shaped by wrongheaded and even disastrous American meddling. George Simpson, Jr. argues that this is all wrong, bringing evidence from the U.S. role in the creation of Israel, the 1953 Iranian coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and the Six-Day War:

The conventional view wrongly inverts Washington’s Middle East policy and the nature of its relations with local allies. Not only have Middle Eastern actors not been hapless pawns of foreign powers, but they have been active and enterprising free agents pursuing their own goals and agendas, often beyond Washington’s control and at times against its wishes. . . .

The roots of what Jean-François Revel termed “the theory of American guilt in all things” can be traced to the late-19th and early-20th centuries when U.S. diplomats, missionaries, and educators first ventured to the Middle East. These “Arabists” generally held sympathetic views of the cultures and people among whom they lived. While their dominance in the foreign service waned in the wake of World War II, they have retained a profound impact on the Department of State—consistently the most pro-Arab governmental organ. This influence has been further reinforced by a powerful pro-Arab lobby comprising oil companies, lobbyists in the employ of Saudi Arabia, other Arab or Muslim governments, and non-Arab special-interest groups, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the National Iranian American Council, that seek to influence U.S. policies and American public opinion. . . .

[Profoundly] misconstrued are standard criticisms of Washington’s supposedly escalatory role in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Thus, for example, the political scientist William Quandt contended that President Lyndon Johnson “abandoned the policy of making an all-out effort to prevent war” between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors, instead allowing the Israelis to understand “that they could take action without worrying about Washington’s reaction.” Noam Chomsky took this charge a big step further by describing the war as “the U.S.-backed Israeli victory in 1967.”

What is paradoxical in this case is that both the Eisenhower and the Kennedy administrations had repeatedly tried to woo the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser over to the West, only to find their unrequited advances spurned. The two presidents were thus forced to watch Moscow arming Egypt (as well as Syria and Iraq) to the teeth, endangering Israeli security, and upsetting the regional balance of power. As an unintended consequence of this development, Washington gradually consolidated its relations with Jerusalem.

In fact, notes Simpson, the U.S. has been the leading force in pressuring Israel to make territorial concessions, whether with Egypt, Syria, or the Palestinians.

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.