Among many Jews—and indeed among many non-Jews who have spent their lives in America’s secular urban enclaves—there is a widespread belief that evangelical Christian enthusiasm for Zionism is motivated solely by a desire to bring about the messianic era, rather than from any genuine affection for the Jewish people. Jarvis Best, himself a Christian Zionist raised in a fundamentalist church, explains how far this crude stereotype is from the truth, and urges Jews to “take Christian support of Israel at face value.”

In the fundamentalist, conservative church I grew up in, with hymns and organs, long skirts for the ladies and young-earth creationism, preachers frequently borrowed an image from the New Testament book of Romans to explain the relationship between Christians and Jews. It said that Jews were like an olive tree with a strong root in the law, the prophets, and the Torah. . . . Christians were not one with Judaism, but were supported and nourished by it. We were taught that Christians and Jews are natural allies.

Sure, there were political differences; my church was almost 100-percent Republican, and we knew that most American Jews were Democrats. But we did not care. The biblical mandate to support Jewish people trumped the fleeting controversies of partisan politics. I eventually abandoned the fundamentalism of my youth. But I retained my Christianity, and with it, the love of the Jewish people and Israel.

A 2017 survey of evangelicals who support Israel found that the primary reasons for their support were their beliefs that God gave the Land of Israel to Jews and that Israel is the historic Jewish homeland. Only 12 percent of evangelicals cited fulfillment of prophecy as the most important reason to support Israel. . . . In my decades of church attendance, I have heard just two or three sermons on the “end times.”

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.