Monday marked the 40th anniversary of the heroic Israeli operation to free some 100 hostages held by German and Palestinian terrorists at the Entebbe airport in Uganda. In the course of the operation, its commanding officer, Jonathan (Yoni) Netanyahu, brother of the current prime minister, lost his life. Fiamma Nirenstein reflects on the raid’s significance:

Only a sense of moral necessity, dictated by history, could inspire . . . an action like the one Israel boldly carried out in Entebbe, 3,500 kilometers from its borders. . . .

The objective was to rescue the Jewish prisoners held by the terrorists, thus definitely putting an end to the idea that Jews are easy prey for anti-Semites, who have directed their furor against the Jewish people throughout history while the world looked on with indifference. . . .

The image of [Yoni Netanyahu], the generous young hero cut down in the field of battle, in the full of his young life, has come to represent the same Israeli audacity—envied by the whole world—that led to the bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor (another mission impossible) and the kidnapping Adolf Eichmann. Entebbe is, along with the Six-Day War, the achievement that more than any other has changed the image of the Jewish people in the eyes of the world, as well as the Jews’ own perception of themselves.

No longer are Jews sheep being led to the slaughter; instead they are doers of deeds once deemed impossible. Since then, Jews no longer need feel abandoned to the whims of their enemies. Jews can now believe that someone will come for them—and those people will be Israeli soldiers. Since Entebbe, Jews are no longer alone.

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.