In his public defense of the Iran deal, President Obama has repeatedly played on left-wing bile toward neoconservatives, as Eli Lake writes:

It’s true that neoconservatives in 2002 and 2003 supported and argued for the Iraq war. Some of them helped plan the war. But many Democrats also supported the Iraq war. . . . And yet in 2015 many prominent progressives still obsess about the out-of-power neoconservatives, and darkly imply that they undermine the national interest on behalf of Israel.

For Obama’s base, the neoconservatives were not just policy intellectuals on the wrong side of an unpopular war, but were instead agents that pulled off a kind of coup d’état and foisted a war on an unsuspecting public. . . . What a terrifying world! Every election brings with it the prospect that our republic will fall under the power of a bunch of disloyal bureaucrats eager to shed American blood for Israel.

Suggesting that another disastrous war in the Middle East is just a few op-ed columns away, the president can activate progressive bloggers, volunteers, and activists who themselves should be disappointed by Obama’s foreign policy.

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.