Now that Bernie Sanders has won the New Hampshire primary, and came in second, by a hairsbreadth, in the Iowa caucuses, the possibility seems greater that the aging Jewish radical could become the Democratic nominee for the presidency. Citing the troubling parallels to the takeover of Britain’s Labor party by Jeremy Corbyn and his fellow hard-left anti-Semites, Yossi Klein Halevi believes such an outcome would be nothing short of disastrous for American Jews: :

Bernie Sanders . . . has repeatedly affirmed his support for Israel’s right to exist, though he is far more equivocal about its right to defend that right. We all know about his time on a kibbutz. . . . But more than any other leading politician, Sanders is responsible for mainstreaming the Corbynist wing of the Democratic party. The party’s anti-Zionists, like Linda Sarsour, have gathered around Sanders. And Sanders himself supported Jeremy Corbyn—ignoring the fears of British Jews, who overwhelmingly saw Corbyn as an anti-Semite. . . . Under President Sanders, those still-renegade voices within the Democratic party would have intimate access to the White House.

And then there’s the video clip of Sanders, taken during his Soviet honeymoon in 1988, sitting bare-chested in a sauna and toasting Soviet officials. That astonishing scene portrays a Jew indifferent to his people’s torment [under Soviet tyranny]. Bernie Sanders is not an enemy of the Jewish people. He simply doesn’t care enough about Jewish concerns to be considered a friend.

President Sanders would be taking office at a time when the stakes could not possibly be higher for Israel. The current low-key Israel-Iran war could transform at any moment into a full-scale, multi-front regional conflict. The IDF has repeatedly warned that, in the next phase of this ongoing war, tens of thousands of missiles and rockets will fall on Israeli cities. Israel, according to the IDF, will respond with a massive invasion of southern Lebanon and the destruction of Lebanon’s infrastructure. The Israeli counterattack could widen to include targets in Iran itself.

In that entirely realistic scenario, whose side would President Bernie be on?

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.