All too often, those accused of anti-Semitism respond with the counteraccusation that their opponents are mistaking “legitimate criticism of Israel” for hatred of Jews. Yet, writes David Harsanyi, recent events only demonstrate how close anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism really are:

The [Poway] shooter’s manifesto makes clear that he didn’t kill because of Donald Trump or some alleged “dog whistle” or a New York Times cartoon. . . . Although we shouldn’t put too much thought into his vile rantings, the man was clearly a racist who detested Jews and “Zionists” because he saw them as the enemies of white people. . . .

The shooter’s rhetoric, thankfully, is already unacceptable in mainstream American discourse. The only anti-Semitism still widely used in public discourse is the kind masquerading as “anti-Zionism.” . . . The New York Times cartoon depicting Trump as a blind man being led by the Star of David-bedecked Benjamin Netanyahu was a pictorial interpretation of a paranoid grievance that many anti-Israel progressives and paleoconservatives have been peddling for years: that Jews control the U.S. government. . . .

When outlets like The New York Times spend decades normalizing the idea that Zionism is tantamount to fascism and apartheid, it is just a matter of time before some hapless editor at the newspaper—if that’s really what happened—has trouble differentiating between the supposedly “anti-Israel” cartoon and a demonstrably anti-Jewish one.

This position has driven them not only to embrace a decades-long bias but has opened them up to publishing all strands of ugly propaganda. Just one week before running the cartoon, the Times published an Easter op-ed identifying Jesus as “most likely a Palestinian man with dark skin.” Trying to strip a couple of thousand years of Jewish (and Christian) history to promote a comforting fantasy for progressives is arguably more anti-Semitic than any dumb cartoon.

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.