Why is it, asks David Gelernter, that the American political scene is filled with so much vitriol, and that so much (though far from all) of it comes from the left? He sees the problem as a result of letting politics fill the vacuum created by the disappearance of religion:

American conservatives tend to be practicing Christians or Jews. Liberals tend to be atheists or agnostics. (Yes, there are exceptions—to nearly everything, always; but that doesn’t mean we can stop thinking.) . . . You might make football, rock music, or hard science your chosen faith. Some people do. But politics, with its underlying principles and striking public ceremonies, is the obvious religion substitute.

For most conservatives, politics is just politics. For most liberals, politics is their faith, in default of any other; it is the basis of their moral life.

Traditional religion used to be the iron grate that kept worldly beliefs from falling into the flames and turning into red-hot religious convictions in their own right. Among most conservatives it still is.

But for modern liberals it is only natural to be upset, defensive, dogmatic, and immovable when you are challenged on your political views. Few of us are prepared to defend our deepest spiritual beliefs. Most of us rarely think about them. Many of us have never had reason to believe them; we simply believe what our parents did. That is perfectly fair and suitable—except when rational, worldly politics is forced to confront politics-as-religion head-to-head.

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.