Growing anti-Semitism, an Islamist government, hostility toward Israel, and assimilation threaten the survival of the Jewish community of Turkey, which is now thought to number 15,000 souls. In a synagogue in Istanbul, there is a helmet under every seat in case of another attack like the 2003 truck bombings that left 27 dead. Avi Lewis writes:

With an illustrious 700-year history behind them, Turkey’s Jews now seem wedged between a rock and a hard place. While outbursts of anti-Semitic rhetoric and growing hostility toward Israel under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan make the community increasingly uneasy, some Jewish leaders say they are just as concerned over assimilation, intermarriage, and emigration. But they remain adamant that Jewish life will persist here, regardless of the growing intolerance and Islamization of Turkish society.

A spokesman for the Jewish community’s official [organization] says Turkey’s Jews are dismayed by the uptick in anti-Semitic speech and media articles but still try, in their limited capacity, to bring these issues to the attention of the public and government to solve them via the legal system. . . .

While some members are indeed in the process of leaving because of the anti-Semitic environment, others are staying put, and a small number are even returning. The general consensus is that of a highly ambivalent community taking a wait-and-see approach to political developments.

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.