Among Western and Israeli scholars of Middle Eastern Jewry, writes Lyn Julius, there has been increasing interest in documenting the racism—real and imagined—that these Jews faced after coming to Israel. Such writers have taken to referring to their subjects as “Arab Jews,” a term historically never in general use by either Arabs or those Jews who lived among them. Behind this approach is the work of the Mizraḥi anti-Zionist Ella Shohat, whose work Julius describes:

Shohat, a professor at New York University, made her name by applying Edward Said’s theory of orientalism to Israel, claiming that both Mizraḥi Jews and the Arabs are victims of the West—i.e., Ashkenazim. Mizraḥim and Arabs [according to this logic] have more in common with each other than Jews from the East have with Jews from the West. The former, Shohat and her ilk contend, were “torn away” from their comfortable “Arab” environment by Zionism and colonialism and turned into involuntary enemies.

Julius contrasts this view with that of the Baghdad-born Israeli literary scholar and memoirist Sasson Somekh, who died on August 18, and who also used the phrase “Arab Jew,” though not in the new “politically correct” sense, in the subtitles of both volumes of his autobiography:

For Somekh, “Arab Jew” is a “cultural definition of a Jew who speaks Arabic and grew up in a Muslim environment. . . . Anyone who defines himself as an Arab Jew to attack others, but who does not speak Arabic, . . . does not count as such. [To the extent that] being a Zionist means [believing] that all Jews should come [to Israel], I am an Israeli patriot.”

The vast majority of Jews from the Arab world have not historically identified as Arabs—in fact, many would be offended to be so labeled. But post- and anti-Zionist academics continue to turn a deaf ear to what most Jews raised in Arab countries themselves say and feel, so long as “discrimination” against Mizraḥim can serve as a useful stick with which to bash Zionism.

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.