Over the past century, neither the bureaucrats at the U.S. State Department nor scholars of foreign relations have ascribed much importance to religion, preferring to look to other motivations in explaining and predicting the behavior of peoples and governments. By ignoring faith, and assuming that the progress of modernity leads inexorably to greater secularization, they have consistently failed to understand the world as it is, argues Charles Hill:

This blinkered view of the world meant that diplomatic analysts could not accurately interpret the emergence, rise, and growth—in fervor and extent—of a radical Islamist movement determined to restore Muslim political-ideological-theological power that had collapsed in 1924 with the end of the Ottoman empire and the caliphate. The sudden violent shift by many supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s goal of a “democratic socialist secular state” toward an extreme Islamist outcome was misinterpreted as no more than further evidence of actions carried out for strictly political purposes by people who had no other avenues of expression.

When Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution overthrew the shah to establish the first Islamist rule over a recognized state in the [modern] international system, Foreign Service specialists on Iran hurried with assurances that nothing of serious religious significance had occurred and that the U.S. could “do business” with what would be just another pragmatic Middle Eastern regime. And when Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat was assassinated in 1981, the “political cone” of the U.S. Foreign Service (including this writer) considered it a purely political act carried out in support of the Palestinians.

Not until after the 1993 first Islamist bombing of the World Trade Center did a review of the old videotapes of the Sadat assassination enable diplomats to “see” for the first time that the imprisoned perpetrators were openly declaring the religious inspiration behind their actions. . . . In retrospect, the assassins’ motives become clear—they believed Sadat a tyrant and his murder justified in the name of their religion.

A revised interpretation of the modern centuries reveals an age assumed to be secular, but actually suffused with religious politics and aggressions worldwide—with America as “the leader of the free world” newly comprehensible as acting on an unacknowledged spiritual basis.

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.