With the emergence of the alt-right onto the American political scene, right-wing anti-Semitism has crawled back out from the shadows. In the 1950s, William F. Buckley, Jr. had made strenuous efforts to drive anti-Semitism out of the pages of National Review and out of the ranks of the new conservative movement that he was hoping to shape. He renewed these efforts in the 1990s, as his erstwhile colleagues Joseph Sobran and Patrick J. Buchanan became increasingly vocal about their hatred of Jews and the Jewish state. The experience resulted in a book, In Search of Anti-Semitism. In conversation with Jonathan Silver, Matthew Continetti discusses Buckley’s book and the issue of right-wing anti-Semitism then and now. (Audio, 46 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available at the link below.)

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.