A common theme of today’s anti-Israel rhetoric in the U.S. is the notion that Israelis are European (i.e., “white”) colonizers oppressing the non-European (i.e., “brown”) indigenous Palestinian Arabs. Such a framing of the conflict reduces it to racial terms familiar to most American, with clear moral valences. But, as Hen Mazzig notes, it has little connection to reality:

Only about 30 percent of Israeli Jews are of solely Ashkenazi (i.e., European) descent. . . . Jews that were expelled from nations across the Middle East have been crucial in building and defending the Jewish state since its outset. Israel, the world’s only Jewish state, was established . . . for all Jews, from every part of the world—the Middle East, North Africa, Ethiopia, Asia and, yes, Europe. No matter where Jews have physically resided, they have maintained a connection to the land of Israel, where our story started and where today we continue to craft it.

The likes of the Women’s March activist Tamika Mallory, the Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, and, more recently, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib falsify reality in their discussions of Palestinians’ “intersectional” struggle [which implies an inextricable tie to racial grievances in the U.S.], their use of the term “apartheid” to characterize Israeli policy, and their tendency to define Israelis as Ashkenazi Jews alone.

I believe their misrepresentations are part of a strategic campaign to taint Israel as an extension of “privileged” and powerful white Europe, thereby justifying any and all attacks on it. This way of thinking signals a dangerous trend that positions Israel as a colonialist aggressor rather than a haven for those fleeing oppression. [And], it [entirely ignores] the story of my family, which came to Israel from Iraq and Tunisia. . . .

Israel is a place where an indigenous people have reclaimed their land and revived their ancient language, despite being surrounded by hostile neighbors and hounded by radicalized Arab nationalists who cannot tolerate any political entity in the region other than their own. Jews that were expelled from nations across the Middle East, who sacrificed all they had, have been crucial in building and defending the Jewish state since its outset.

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.