In a recent report, a group of researchers at the University of Tel Aviv observed an increase in expressions of anti-Semitism in the wake of the pandemic. As Cary Nelson notes, claims that Jews or Israel are somehow responsible for or exacerbating the pandemic can be found on the pens and lips of the European far right and far left, as well as of journalists and officials in Turkey, Iran, and other Muslim countries. Similar slanders have also appeared in a recent letter from four physicians published in the British medical journal the Lancet, accusing the Jewish state of inflicting a coronavirus crisis on the people of Gaza:

Following the pattern modeled for years in the international BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) movement, [the letter’s authors] make no realistic suggestions about how to improve Gaza’s fragile, decaying infrastructure and instead concentrate on demonizing Israel. Nor do they hold Hamas leaders responsible for their indifference to the general health and welfare of Gazans [or for using] iron and cement smuggled from Egypt [to build] attack tunnels [rather than] hospitals.

Oddly enough, . . . the blockade [of the Strip] actually provides a measure of protection from the pandemic. Travel to and from Gaza has long been severely restricted and comprehensively monitored both through the blockade maintained by Egypt and Israel and by Hamas itself. . . . In response to the pandemic, the border crossings are largely closed to personal travel. If Gazans continue to test the limited number of people entering the country and to isolate not only those who test positive for the virus but all entering Gaza, it may be possible either to prevent or to delay quite substantially the spread of the pandemic into the general population there.

The absolute priority for Gaza, therefore, is containment, a strategy in which [the letter’s authors] seem to show no interest, perhaps because it gives no grounds for condemning Israel. For better or worse, containment is Hamas’s responsibility.

[But the authors] treat the pandemic as the fated outcome of the original sin of the founding of the Jewish state. In succumbing to these political convictions, they fail as physicians to offer any of the advice doctors should offer. . . . Either [they] do not know the appropriate medical advice to offer, or they are so blinded by hostility to Israel that they cannot communicate 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.