While a prisoner at a Nazi forced-labor camp, Regina Honigman kept a diary in which she composed a special version of the Haggadah. Omri Efraim writes:

The research department at Yad Vashem has located a Passover Haggadah written between the pages in the diary of Regina Honigman, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned in Gabersdorf labor camp on the Czechoslovakian side of the Sudeten mountains. . . .

“We were once slaves in Egypt,” wrote Honigman, “and now again in Gabersdorf. In history we were subject to Your grace/mercy, which prevented us from being swallowed up [in the parting of the Red Sea]. . . . The day of salvation will come to Gabersdorf.”

Symbolizing liberty and hope, Passover held special significance in the camp. . . . The singular Passover Haggadah found in Honigman’s diary included quotes and poems written by her fellow prisoners.

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.