One of the oldest of anti-Semitic tropes is the image of Jews secretly manipulating the economy and using credit to take advantage of simple folk. It has also been found to correlate with reduced wealth in people who subscribe to it—like today’s radical (and not so radical) Islamists. Walter Russell Mead and his staff explain:

The association that anti-Semites make between “the Jews” and the role of finance would be the kind of simplification that would appeal to jihadis trying to analyze a world that they can’t understand but that frightens and, they fear, dominates them. Linking “the Jews” with Western finance helps jihadis build an all-embracing picture of a shadowy and powerful enemy, and offers the illusion of insight and mastery. . . . It is an expensive and disabling error, but an attractive and glittering one. In any case, the unreflecting credulity which makes crude forgeries like the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion so widely popular in Islamist circles today is itself a sign of cultural decadence and intellectual blight.

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.