While Iraq and Syria collapse, the Kurds of these two countries have rallied together and stood their ground against Islamic State (IS)—despite considerable odds. Haviv Rettig Gur speculates about the possibility that they will create an independent state of their own, and the potential affinity of such a state with the Jewish one:

The Kurds have learned the same lesson as the Middle East’s Jews: solidarity and clarity of purpose are military assets as crucial to survival and victory as ammunition and warplanes. . . .

If ever a people deserved to carve out a homeland from the wreckage of the collapsing Middle East, [the Kurds] do. . . . [P]erhaps, if they eventually emerge from the wars of Syria and Iraq victorious, prosperous, and democratic, the Kurds can . . . [set] a precedent that legitimizes moderation and liberal nationalism in a region that has largely lost its faith in the redemptive power of ideas.

I don’t know much about the Kurds, but I know Israel. Israel’s democracy and prosperity did not originate in a generation of founding philosopher-fathers or in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of limited monarchy. Israel is democratic despite its Jews’ hailing almost entirely from dictatorships, despite its lack of a constitution, despite its birth and development in the shadow of war, despite the prominence of its military elite, despite deep and abiding ethnic divides. Its democratic roots, in other words, were not carried here from other lands or inherited from its intellectual heroes. Rather, Israel’s democracy was born in the ethos of national solidarity given to us by the Jewish intellectual tradition and the architects of modern political Zionism.

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.