While hostility toward the Jewish state, and distortions of news stories about it, are nothing new coming from the New York Times, neither it nor likeminded publications have managed to sway the American populace, which remains overwhelmingly sympathetic to Israel. Nonetheless, argues Jonathan Tobin, the sins of the Times should be a matter of concern because of the paper’s influence on American Jewry. He cites two recent examples:

In a piece that first appeared online on May 7, a story about the way the Israeli defense establishment has devoted its resources to fighting the coronavirus pandemic began with the following: “The Israeli Defense Ministry’s research-and-development arm is best known for pioneering cutting-edge ways to kill people and blow things up, with stealth tanks and sniper drones among its more lethal recent projects. But its latest mission is lifesaving.”

Nor was this an isolated example. Two days later, the paper published an article about the refusal of the Palestinian Authority to cease its . . . policy [of providing] terrorists who assault, wound, or kill Israelis with salaries and pensions for their families. The story focused on an attempt to stop Palestinian banks in the West Bank from processing the payments. The headline for the Times’s story though, put it this way: “Israel Cracks Down on Banks Over Payments to Palestinian Inmates.” . . . Phrased that way, it makes the effort sound like a way to punish poor souls who have had the bad luck to fall under the power of the Israeli military and whose families are being prevented from getting the help they need.

While some Jews are outraged by biased coverage that unfairly depicts Israel as a villain, others internalize theses calumnies and distance themselves from the Jewish state. An average consumer of news may not be influenced by the Times. But a not-insignificant portion of American Jewry still regards the newspaper with the sort of veneration that observant Jews have for religious texts. The Times . . . may not have turned Americans against Israel, but it has been doing a bang-up job of turning Jews against each other for decades.

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.