In northern Azerbaijan, not far from the Russian border, lies the town of Krasnaya Sloboda, whose residents are almost exclusively “Mountain Jews”—indigenous Caucasian Jews who speak their own language, related to Persian. Thanks to the presence of a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary from Israel, the community has experienced a religious revival, but its numbers are dwindling as younger people move to Russia in search of economic opportunity. Lee Gancman writes:

The town itself was founded as a haven for Jews in 1742 by Fatelli Khan, the Muslim emir of the [adjacent] town of Quba, located in a relatively flat area just south of the modern-day border with the Russian province of Dagestan. While the rugged and remote area to the north had served as a haven for Jews for centuries, a period of unrest beginning in the 18th century saw local Sunnis turn on their Jewish counterparts and send them fleeing.

“At the time there was much persecution of Mountain Jews, and one Jewish town was burned down,” explains Alexander Murinson, a faculty member at Bahçeşehir International University and expert on Caucasian Jewish communities. . . .

While for a time in the mid-20th century the town was considered by some to be the largest all-Jewish settlement outside the land of Israel, numbers have since dwindled from an estimated peak of 18,000 to . . . around 1,000 permanent residents.

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.