Last week, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar caused a stir by repeating the canard that Jews—specifically, the American Israel Political Affair Committee (AIPAC)—use financial influence to manipulate U.S. policy regarding Israel. There is nothing new about this accusation, which was expanded into book form by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer in 2007. Not only is it factually untrue—AIPAC doesn’t even make donations to candidates—but it is based on a misunderstanding of the roots of the U.S.-Israel relationship, as David French writes:

America’s long support for Israel—often in the face of fierce criticism from key allies and painful economic reprisal from the Arab world—represents an enduring, bipartisan commitment to moral clarity in the Middle East. For the quarter-century following Israel’s founding, it was subjected to repeated, genocidal threats to its existence. It has served as a homeland for the Jewish people even as Arab nations rendered life intolerable for more than 800,000 of their Jewish citizens, sometimes destroying communities that had existed for centuries. Israel took in hundreds of thousands of refugees, receiving them as the world’s only Jewish state. . . .

At the same time, the citizens of Israel—Arab and Jewish alike—enjoy a greater degree of individual liberty than the citizens of any other Middle Eastern state. Israel is the most stable democracy in the Middle East. Generations of American politicians—from both parties—have seen these realities and have made the proper moral decision to support an embattled minority in the face of an avalanche of outright hate. Our nation has made that choice even when . . . a more pragmatic politics might dictate following in the path of nations like France, which yanked military support for Israel at a crucial moment in Israel’s history. . . .

[The two] nations have a bond that endures beyond the fact that Israel has become a powerful and important ally—especially in our war against jihadists. It’s a bond that exists in part because our nation’s support for Israel in spite of the often significant strategic and economic incentives to abandon it to its fate demonstrates America as its best self—a nation characterized by its commitment to high ideals, not just to the raw exercise of influence and power.

A hostile Arab world has far more money and resources than the small Jewish state that it all too often seeks to eradicate. If cash is truly king, we would have thrown Israel under the bus in generations past.

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.