Responding to recent political controversies in the U.S. regarding the Jewish state, the columnist Thomas Friedman has argued that President Trump is trying deliberately to paint “the entire Republican Party as pro-Israel and the entire Democratic Party as anti-Israel.” Perhaps, writes Kevin Williamson, but that’s not the whole picture:

U.S. interest in the Middle East was rekindled after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Israel’s liberalism and democracy were shown in starkest contrast to the savagery of those attacks and the savagery of those around the Muslim world who endorsed and celebrated them. Israel’s social and economic success story is, cynically seen, a great big raised middle finger to the backward and stagnant quarters that incubated and harbored the likes of Osama bin Laden.

But the American left takes an intense interest in Israel as well [as its supporters on the right]: the left hates Israel, and many of its leading lights wish to see the Jewish state as such liquidated. . . . But why is the left so intensely interested in Israel? Of course, there are things to criticize about Israel and its government. But it is by any measure of decency and liberalism a top-tier country. I am not aware of a boycott movement directed at, say, Pakistan. Or Turkey. Or Egypt. Or Venezuela. Or Russia. Or Burma. Or China. Or the Palestinian statelet, for that matter. . . .

And . . . are Thomas Friedman et al. quite confident that it is Donald Trump making the U.S.-Israel relationship a partisan issue and not, say, the people looking to ruin Israel economically as a pet political project? It is easy to see an argument that a thriving Israel accords with U.S. interests abroad. Is there an argument that a diminished and destabilized Israel—or an Israel consumed in fire, as Representative Omar’s rambunctious little Hamas buddies would prefer—is in the interest of the United States?

If there is, I have not yet heard it.

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.