The Jewish co-chair of the Oxford University Labor Club has resigned over that organization’s increasing anti-Semitism. Responding, Simon Schama reflects on the resurfacing of the European left’s historical hatred of Jews and, in time, the Jewish state:

In the 19th century, . . . the left made its contribution to [modern anti-Semitism]. Demonstrating that you do not have to be Gentile to be an anti-Semite, Karl Marx characterized Judaism as nothing more than the cult of Mammon, and declared that the world needed emancipating from the Jews. Others on the left—the social philosophers Bruno Bauer, Charles Fourier, and Pierre Proudhon and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin—echoed the message: bloodsucking, whether the physical or the economic kind, was what Jews did. . . .

The Communist Moses Hess, who had been Marx’s editor and friend, became persuaded, all too presciently, that the socialist revolution would do nothing to normalize Jewish existence, not least because so many socialists declared that emancipating the Jews had been a terrible mistake. Hess concluded that only self-determination could protect the Jews from the phobias of right and left alike. He became the first socialist Zionist. . . .

[Now, with] the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Marxist socialism around the world, militant energies have needed somewhere to go. The battle against inequalities under liberal capitalism has mobilized some of that passion, but postcolonial guilt has fired up the war against its prize whipping boy, Zionism, like no other cause. Every such crusade needs a villain along with its banners—and I wonder who that could possibly be?

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.