In a speech last week extolling the nuclear deal with Iran, the American secretary of state used the words “Israel” and “Israeli” a total of 26 times. To Rick Richman, he seemed to be “protesting a bit too much about his concern for the ally put at existential risk” by the agreement. Richman also notes some striking similarities between Kerry’s speech and Neville Chamberlain’s defense before the British parliament of the 1938 Munich agreement with Hitler—though Chamberlain emerges favorably from the comparison:

In the debate on the Munich agreement, Chamberlain’s claims were actually more modest than Kerry’s. . . . He said he knew “weakness in armed strength means weakness in diplomacy” and that he had a program to accelerate Britain’s re-armament. . . . At least Chamberlain did not wax on [as did Kerry] about “the builders of stability” overcoming “the destroyers of hope.” At least he did not compliment himself for insisting that Hitler adhere to “the best” in himself. At least he did not assert that such insistence would “shape a safer and a more humane world.” And he had the good grace to admit that his extemporaneous remark about “peace for our time” resulted from a long day and cheering crowds.

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.