On July 23, the House of Representatives passed a bill condemning boycotts of Israel. Only seventeen congressmen—sixteen Democrats and one Republican—voted against the measure. Unsurprisingly, the nays included the dedicated Israel-haters Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, along with their reliable ally Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But they also included less well-known figures, like the Maine congresswoman Chellie Pingree. K.C. Johnson argues that politicians like Pingree—who once expressed entirely run-of-the-mill, moderately pro-Israel attitudes—are exactly whom allies of the Jewish state should worry about the most:

[In 2015], Pingree joined a fringe of House Democrats in signing onto a letter denouncing “Israel’s military detention system targeting children,” including seventeen-year-olds. That many of these teenagers were accused or convicted of serious crimes, including murder, did not seem to concern the signatories who based their complaints solely on the perpetrators’ age. Pingree and her colleagues urged the Obama administration to give the issue “priority status” in the U.S.-Israel relationship.

By early 2017, the former backer of a “secure and democratic Israel” voted against a resolution condemning the Obama administration’s abstention from UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which reversed a decades-long tradition of the United States vetoing resolutions that deemed Israeli control over eastern Jerusalem as contrary to international law. . . . Earlier this year, Pingree was one of only 21 House Democrats to sign on to a bill to create a $19 million fund to monitor alleged abuses of Palestinian children held in Israeli jails.

[T]here’s scant evidence Pingree has given much thought to Israel at all. [Her] opposition to Israel, instead, seems to be more tribal, caused by her fellow progressives coming to view the Jewish state skeptically. . . . Pingree’s transformation . . . illustrates how a generic legislator lacking deep concerns about Israel could shift to accommodate the newfound support for [its enemies] among some quarters of the Democratic base. For all the attention people like Omar and Tlaib receive, most electorates aren’t going to choose figures who openly traffic in anti-Semitism. But legislators like Chellie Pingree, from districts like Maine’s 1st? They’ll be much of the House Democratic caucus in coming years.

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.