Attending a memorial at New York University for the victims of the New Zealand mosque massacre, Chelsea Clinton was accosted by two students who made clear to her that her “rhetoric” had caused the bloody attack in Christchurch. The pair later wrote an article explaining their rationale: Clinton had gently criticized Representative Ilhan Omar for her anti-Semitic remarks; Omar is a Muslim; therefore, Clinton “stoked hatred” of Muslims. Since the man who slaughtered Muslims at prayer was motivated by anti-Muslim animus—their syllogism concludes—Clinton was clearly responsible. To James Kirchick, this tortured logic is also symptomatic of an emerging leftist attitude toward Jews:

For a growing number of progressives, anti-Semitism has become an ideological obligation as central to their political identity as the universal basic income, the Green New Deal, a 70-percent marginal tax rate, and free higher education. These progressives, of course, cannot openly say this. Anti-Semitism is bad. Some of their best friends are Jews. The Holocaust happened. So they need to redefine anti-Semitism out of existence, while redistributing the valuable cultural capital of Jewish historical suffering to more deserving groups. Thus, [they have begun to speak] of “white Jews.” . . .

“White Jews” is, . . . first and foremost, an epithet—an attempt to make “Jews” synonymous with “white supremacy.” This move is especially invidious, since Jews—“white” or not—are themselves the primary victims of theories of racial supremacy, and anti-Semitism is central to white-supremacist ideology. . . .

But the larger point of marking Jews as “white” is to render them politically unassimilable into the left’s virtuous coalition of the oppressed, which includes plenty of third-worldist groups and alignments that are rooted in a political discourse in which conspiratorial anti-Semitism is normal. The solution that progressives have apparently alighted on is not to educate their allies out of bigotry and ignorance but to trim “Jewishness” of any traits that might set off wild, conspiratorial fulminations by the people they wish to position as innocent victims.

Notice how it is only Jews who are endowed with a racial descriptor; no one on the left is busy fingering “white Muslims.” This assault on reason and history puts Jews, or “white Jews,” in their place as inherently oppressive and vile, while [donating] their valuable history of oppression to its “true” inheritors—namely progressives and their handpicked allies.

Those handpicked allies are Muslim foes of Israel eager to find common cause with the hard left.

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.