As anti-Semitism continues to tighten its hold on the UK’s Labor party, the actress and comedienne Maureen Lipman imagines an Englishwoman calling in to a radio show to comment on an on-air discussion of the subject:

It’s just with regard to, like, every day more discussion about anti-Semitism, . . . well, I just keep thinking one thing. . . .

Why is it always them?

Well—Jewish people.

I mean—day in and day out it’s Jewish people and their anti-Semitism—always them isn’t it . . . we have to listen to like their problems and who’s getting at them. . . . My husband says, “Change the record, mate.”

I mean nothing against them. I’m a broad-minded person, like, live and let live that’s what I say, but you have to admit [laughs], it is non-stop with them isn’t it?

Well, anti-Semitism. With the Labor party and with Holocaust Day and the lady MP’s getting bullied—like I mean no other religion gets that much airtime do they?

No, it’s not their fault but . . . but really, what gets me is—what have they got to complain about?

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.