In an excerpt from her recent book, The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky, Susie Linfield explores the great Tunisian-Jewish writer Albert Memmi’s sustained and simultaneous commitment to socialism, Zionism, and Jewishness. For Memmi, whose 1957 book The Colonizer and the Colonized galvanized a generation of anti-colonial thinkers, Zionism was above all a national liberation movement. But unlike his colleagues on the left, he foresaw, and never shied away from condemning, the dangers of terrorism, anti-Semitism, and Islamic fundamentalism from within former European colonies:

In Memmi’s view, there was nothing picturesque about the Jewish ghetto [of Tunis in which he was raised]: it was a place of “physiological poverty, undernourishment, syphilis, tuberculosis, mental illness, . . . an everyday, all-day historical catastrophe.” . . . But the ghetto was also a world of solidity and belonging. Memmi would recall the comfort of its “collective presence,” which embodied “a kind of common soul.” It was Jewish culture, not the Jewish religion, that he treasured. Yet this did not translate into scorn for his religious forebears or for observant Jews. [He] was surprised when, arriving in Paris after World War II, he discovered that Jewish-French intellectuals had little sense of a positive Jewish past; this alienation struck him as “utterly ridiculous.” In contrast, he considered himself “heir to a powerful tradition and culture.” . . .

Memmi was also prescient about the prominent place that terrorism would occupy in these future struggles, though he could not foresee the extent of the barbarism to come. It is a very bad sign of the times in which we live that the terrorism of the postwar anti-colonial movements seems almost quaint compared to today’s beheadings, suicide bombings, mass rapes, and deliberate targeting of . . . civilians of every stripe, especially women and girls. Memmi assumed he was writing within a leftist tradition that “condemns terrorism and political assassination”; he termed such actions “incomprehensible, shocking, and politically absurd. For example, the death of children and persons outside the struggle.” But that tradition was weakening even as he wrote.

In [his 1962] Portrait of a Jew, Memmi parts company with a kind of generic universalism and introduces a theme he would subsequently develop: the reality, and necessity, of national identity. “A man is not just a piece of abstract humanity,” he argued. People live their lives within particular nations; there is nothing reactionary about this. “True justice, true tolerance, universal brotherhood do not demand negation of differences among men, but a recognition and perhaps an appreciation of them.” Jews in particular had paid a high price for abstract universalism, which suppressed their particular history and particular needs.

Now it was time to acknowledge a truth that was existential and political at once: “I am convinced that difference is the condition requisite to all dignity and to all liberation. . . . To be is to be different.” . . . Memmi was not, however, an exponent of what we now call identity politics. On the contrary, he would criticize the politics of differentiation as they morphed into a kind of narcissistic self-preoccupation.

As for the left’s—and even the Jewish left’s—eventual turn against Zionism, Memmi would argue trenchantly that the “failure of the European left with regard to the Jewish problem was no accident.” Of the insistence of Jewish Marxists, and of Marx himself, that “a Jew’s only duty was to disappear,” Memmi demanded, “From what other people could one ask such saintliness?”

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.