The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has attracted attention by resuscitating long-discredited theories about the supposedly non-Middle Eastern origins of the Jewish people and ostentatiously declaring that he himself has ceased to be a Jew. Much more interesting than his arguments are their sources, and the way they have been eagerly endorsed by Arab anti-Semites, as Shaul Bartal writes:

Sand’s ideas regarding race theory are borrowed from Nazi, Islamic, Arab, and Palestinian sources that claim to have scientifically proved that the Jews of today do not descend from ancient Israelite stock. One example is a book by the Islamic activist Hassan Bash, at-Tarbiya as-Sahyonia, Min Ansariyat at-Torah ila Damu’ya al-Ihtilal (“Zionist Education, from the Racism of the Torah to the Bloodletting of the Occupation”). . . . [In the Arab world,] Bash is considered a leading researcher of Zionist culture and Jewish religion and has written 32 books, most of which slander the Jewish religion, the Torah, and Christianity. . . .

The unique aspect of Sand’s book thus is not its content but rather its context. Sand’s innovation is that he, a Jewish professor of history from a leading “Zionist” university, step-by-step, in beautifully phrased Hebrew, justifies and approves all the Palestinian historical claims. It is no surprise that The Invention of the Jewish People became a major best-seller in the Arab world and is treasured by Palestinians.

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.