Born in Russia in 1891, Aaron Kotler had by the 1930s developed a reputation as one of Eastern Europe’s leading talmudic scholars. After World War II began, he managed to escape both the Nazis and the Soviets, arriving in the U.S. in 1941. He thereupon devoted himself to the activities of the Vaad Hatzalah, an Orthodox organization founded to help Jews, especially those affiliated with religious institutions, flee Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1943, he founded a yeshivah in Lakewood, New Jersey, now a leading institution of American ultra-Orthodoxy. Moshe Rackove writes:

No matter was too large or too small for Rabbi Kotler. He worked in the Vaad Hatzalah offices urging rescue efforts, and marshaled Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s assistance in sending refugees money. His West Side apartment in New York City became the address for letters from all corners of the globe with individual requests. The letters reflected their belief in his concern for them, and his ability to tend to their plight. He corresponded with his students trapped in Samarkand, Uzebekistan after being shipped to Siberia by the Soviets in 1941, sending them care packages, with letters signed, “Your friend who will not forget you.” . . .

[Ultimately], the individual was paramount in Kotler’s mind. . . .

Kotler fully understood the enormity of the Holocaust on a personal level. He lost family members. . . . Yet he understood that [his] main focus [ought to be on rebuilding].

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.