Recently, the organization If Not Now, whose stated goal is to end U.S. Jewry’s “support for the occupation,” has made the Birthright program—which gives young American Jews free trips to Israel—a target of its invective. They have now been joined by the somewhat more moderate voice of the journalist Peter Beinart, who argued in a column this week that Birthright is morally suspect unless it starts bringing participants to meet Palestinians living in the West Bank. Daniel Gordis, a friend and regular sparring partner of Beinart, dissects his argument, and what lies behind it:

Which Palestinians does Peter think Birthright participants ought to meet? Palestinians in the West Bank are no more monolithic than Israelis or American Jews. Does he want them to hear from Palestinians who will tell them that they’d much rather live under Israeli occupation than under the corrupt Palestinian Authority (there are, indeed, such people), or Palestinians who will tell them that ending the occupation is but the first step on their drive to ending the state of Israel? Or does he want them to hear from Palestinians who insist on ending the occupation but have no desire to destroy Israel? What percentage of Palestinians are those people? How does Peter know? On what basis of what would Beinart have Birthright choose? Those who represent the majority? Or those who mirror Beinart’s progressive yet “Zionist” values? . . .

How are we to explain the intellectual sloppiness? Perhaps it’s because American Jewish progressives, with If Not Now at their helm, have decided to destroy Birthright, and Beinart would rather join the crowd than try to lead them back to a responsible position. Or perhaps (as he notes) it’s because he finds Sheldon Adelson so distasteful that he wants any program that Adelson funds taken down? [I]s that reason enough to destroy a program that has brought hundreds of thousands of young American Jews to have a meaningful engagement with Israel? Instead of destroying Birthright, why don’t Beinart, If Not Now, and others raise the tens of millions of dollars it would cost to run an alternative program? . . . The reason has to do with the particular form of Zionism characteristic of much of the American Jewish left.

At the heart of this brand of Zionism, writes Gordis, is the conceit that it is the duty of American Jews to save Israel from itself:

If 82 percent of Israelis now define themselves as center-to-right-wing, [as a recent study suggests], how can American liberal Jews save Israel without subverting the will of Israel’s majority? At the same time, though, how can American Jews both boast about Israel’s robust democracy and also decide to override it in the name of their American, suburban, progressive ethos? . . . Is Israel’s democracy not sacred? Or is it simply less sacred than the moral comfort of American Jewish progressives? . . .

[As for the] young American Jewish progressives [of If Not Now]: do they believe that they are more moral than the Israeli left? . . . Or, more likely, is it that they care about their progressive credentials much more than they care about Israel?

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.