David Bezmozgis’s The Betrayers tells the story of Baruch Kotler, a Soviet refusenik-turned-Israeli politician, and his encounter with Vladimir Tankilevich, the man who betrayed Kotler to the KGB decades earlier. Not only does the novel possess a seriousness rare in contemporary fiction, writes Marat Grinberg, but it contains within it a sophisticated evaluation of the major tensions inherent in Zionism:

The principal goal of Zionism was the normalization of the Diaspora Jew. In the infamous words attributed to David Ben-Gurion, Zionism will be victorious only once Israel has its own thieves and prostitutes. A normal country requires its people to make normal compromises: individual, moral, and political. This is what Kotler cannot abide. . . . [H]e learns from Tankilevich that the latter betrayed him because the KGB had threatened to ruin [Tankilevich’s] brother’s life if he didn’t cooperate. . . . While Kotler sees no room for moral compromise (a concession to evil), Tankilevich insists on his moral right to elevate the personal (his brother’s safety) over the collective and ideological. The real-life Tankilevich was a man named Sanya Lipavsky, who betrayed [Natan] Sharansky under very similar circumstances. The conflict is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky. Like him, Bezmozgis does not find an answer, but he does draw an analogy between the very specific challenge to his characters and the challenges facing an entire nation, and an entire people—in this case, Israel’s and the Jewish people’s.

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.