Speaking to a British audience in 2017, the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders declared that “what [Jeremy] Corbyn has done with the Labor party is not dissimilar to we’re trying to do with the Democratic party.” One can assume that Sanders meant only to convey that he wants to make the Democrats more socialist, not more anti-Semitic, but he has never offered any objection to Corbyn’s anti-Semitism, and one of his campaign’s most visible surrogates, Linda Sarsour, would seem to fit right in with Labor, as Dominic Green writes:

Sarsour [recently represented] Sanders’s campaign as a speaker at the American Muslims for Palestine (AMP) conference. . . . Israel, she said, is “built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everyone else”—a libel as equally likely to emerge from the mouths of Islamists as from the thumbs of white nationalists. It’s impossible, Sarsour said, to oppose “white supremacy in America and the idea of being in a state based on race and class” without also opposing the existence of a Jewish state.

Naturally, this specious and defamatory linkage was affirmed by Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. Naturally, when footage of Sarsour’s diatribe appeared online, she did her best to wriggle out of it with a statement about “context”—but not one about AMP’s official conference program, which called Zionism a “disease” intending to “destroy the purity of al-Quds [Jerusalem].”

Sanders’ alliance with Sarsour isn’t just Magical Grandpa, [as some have nicknamed Corbyn], being sentimental about the kids who remind him of his radical youth. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s passion for Islamists, it’s a calculated attempt to catch votes, transform the party membership, and upend the centrist party managers. These tactics worked for Corbyn. But when Magical Grandpa shakes the tree, it’s not just money that falls out.

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.