Recent articles in Jacobin magazine—the flagship publication of the American hard left—have responded to the upsurge of violent attacks on Jews with articles declaring that “to defeat anti-Semitism we must defeat capitalism” and “only the left can defeat anti-Semitism.” For its part, the likeminded Jewish Currents has simply blamed the victims. Ari Hoffman, noting socialism’s long and well-documented history of hostility toward Jews, takes stock of these arguments:

Jews are being shot and macheted, the editors [of] Jewish Currents collectively mused, because they are more effective at developing real estate and extracting government services. “Fifty-five percent of ḥasidic households in New York City live below the poverty line and have been extraordinarily organized in applying for social services en masse, creating stiff competition for public assistance,” they write. And “for historical reasons involving redlining and white flight, many landlords in the area are Ḥasidim; as a result, members of this community function as the faces, and sometimes the scapegoats, of the ongoing gentrification of these neighborhoods and their worsening housing crisis.”

[Setting aside] this ugly portrayal of Jews, . . . the simplicity of blaming everything on “material conditions,” gentrification, and the existing order is indeed tempting. The Jews become the natural victims of the system that they benefit from, and those who attack them are structurally absolved; their acts of violence get added to the bill of particulars in support of the need for revolution. “Context,” [a favorite term of these writers], does all the work, and what’s left over is picked up by “solidarity,” which can mean anything at all except that Jews deserve protection from those who seek to harm them.

In fact, the relationship [between socialism and anti-Semitism] goes the other way. As with the far right, the socialist left is relentlessly bad news for the Jews. Its most successful contemporary avatar, Jeremy Corbyn, presided over the transformation of one of the great political parties in the West into a [den] of anti-Semites. And its most successful tribune in the United States, while himself a proud Jew, seems unable to quit those like Linda Sarsour who speak for him and see behind him a movement more amenable to their hateful commitments.

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.