At present, discussions of contemporary anti-Semitism often focus on a distinction between anti-Semitism of the far left and of the far right—sometimes devolving into debates about which poses a graver threat. An examination of the career of Karl-Heinz Hoffmann, one of Germany’s most well-known neofascists, suggests that the distinction might be far blurrier than is usually assumed. As Sam Izzo writes, Hoffman’s paramilitary organization, the Hoffman Military Sports Group—founded in 1974 and banned in 1980—had a long history of cooperation with Palestinian terrorist groups, to which it supplied secondhand vehicles:

Hoffmann’s initial connection to the Palestinians was likely through Udo Albrecht. Albrecht was a German freelance criminal who fought with the Palestinians in the 1970 Black September uprising in Jordan against King Hussein, leading a militia of neofascists called the Freikorps Adolf Hitler. Sometime in the late 1970s, Albrecht introduced Hoffmann to Abu Ayad, a senior officer in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). . . .

At times, German neofascists directly aided Palestinian terror attacks. For example, Der Spiegel revealed in 2012 that two German neofascists, Willi Pohl and Max Abramowski, aided Black September in the Munich massacre [of Israeli athletes] in 1972 by transporting the terrorists and helping them acquire passports.

[C]onnections between the European far right and Middle Eastern terror groups persist. In 2017, a delegation of the German far-right party Der Dritte Weg (The Third Way) met with Hizballah in Lebanon. The Jerusalem Post later revealed that Hizballah and the Assad regime had a joint PayPal account with Der Dritte Weg, linked to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. While PayPal shut down the account in January 2019, this did not end the relationship. . . .

Using the language of liberation from foreign “occupation,” today’s alt-right, neofascists, and Middle Eastern extremists seek to rid their countries of what they see as a rootless global liberal hegemony while looking backward toward an idealized ancient past, which they hope to achieve through radicalization and terrorist violence.

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.