President Obama recently declared May to be Jewish Heritage Month. Analyzing the attendant proclamation, David Bernstein notes the emphasis it places on Jews’ devotion to fighting for the rights of other groups, and finds it telling:

It’s no secret that many liberal American Jews emphasize the “social-justice” part of their identity. But this doesn’t preclude also recognizing, as part of Jewish Heritage Month, that Jews have contributed disproportionately to the arts, business, medicine, academia, science, and so forth. Nor does it preclude recognizing that American Jews have successfully created unique and innovative Jewish communal charities, educational institutions, and internal religious movements (such as Conservative Judaism), . . . [or] recognizing that American Jews have been at the forefront of helping to establish and defend Israel and in rescuing persecuted Jews, from Ethiopia to the USSR.

I’m sure if you asked whoever drafted the president’s proclamation about these other [achievements], he would say something along the lines of, “yeah, that stuff is nice, too.”

But for some on the far left, including some progressives of Jewish descent, that other stuff isn’t “nice, too.” To them, Jews exist only for the role assigned to them by the progressive mythos—to use their experience of oppression and their “privilege” to fight for the rights of others, and then to assimilate or disappear.

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.