Wednesday, the office of the Minnesota congresswoman Betty McCollum published a statement condemning the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as a “hate group” after it sponsored a Facebook advertisement critical of her. Condemnations of AIPAC and the “Israel Lobby,” which now predominate on the political left, have been a longstanding bipartisan feature of anti-Israel rhetoric in the U.S., ascribing to the group a near-supernatural power to dictate American foreign policy and stifle debate. As Sharon Goldman explains, such fantastical assumptions about Jewish influence go back many centuries, and have changed little:

Leaders of the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel, known as BDS, frequently make use of dangerously overwrought descriptions [when speaking about] Israel, as do its supporters. Recall Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s now-deleted 2012 tweet: “Israel has hypnotized the world; may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” The tweet taps directly into the trope that Jews are not only powerful, but all-powerful—capable of hypnotism that only Allah can reverse.

This . . . language is ubiquitous in BDS [circles], as when Mahmoud Nawajaa, the General Coordinator of the BDS National Committee, accused Zionists of “brainwashing” and controlling U.S. policy, and when the famous BDS supporter [and former member of the rock band Pink Floyd] Roger Waters narrated a documentary film titled “The Occupation of the American Mind.”

That’s how you can recognize the old anti-Semitic canard at work: Israel, the unnaturally powerful Jew of the international arena, has grown into the most oppressive, most dangerous genocidal country in the world and it must be stopped in its hegemonic, demonic tracks.

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.