On February 6, 1938, the Soviet political police arrested a Moscow Jew named Solomon Levenson; he was tried, convicted, and shot—a detail his family would not learn until 2009. Levenson was one of hundreds of thousands of victims of Stalin’s Great Terror, which disproportionately targeted Jews even though historians still debate the role played by anti-Semitism in these events. Having traveled to Moscow in search of more information, Dovid Margolin—Levenson’s great-grandson—discovered that the memory of Stalinist crimes is rapidly being repressed:

I hadn’t planned to enter the building [where the Levensons had lived], but the front doors opened with only a slight tug, so I let myself in. I knocked on what I thought was the correct apartment and explained that my grandmother had once lived here and if it was okay, I would love to take a look around. Strictly speaking, Moscow is the last place in the world where strangers allow you into their apartments (Muscovites do not give directions on the street, either, insisting briskly that they have not the slightest knowledge of whatever location you are seeking), but I got lucky. The kind Jewish woman who ended up being on the other side heard me repeat my familiar-sounding name, viewed my Semitic features through the peephole, and, after unlocking multiple chains and deadbolts, finally let me in.

“This is not your grandmother’s apartment, though,” she told me. “Three generations of my husband’s family have lived here.” . . .

The woman was friendly and helpful, pointing out the places where the Soviets had built walls to split up apartments and various landmarks my grandmother had mentioned to me. But each time I brought the conversation to the central thought on my mind, Stalin’s early-morning arrest of my great-grandfather from the same musty apartment building that I found myself in, she waved it off, preferring to focus on the more pressing issues at hand.

“What Stalin?” she dismissed. “Today we have one tsar, we have Putin, that’s all. Everyone has already forgotten all the rest of it.”

I mentioned to her that it seemed to me that Russia had never made a proper reckoning of its past. “Of course. That’s because we all, probably, were caught up in this,” she answered. “I hate the subject. I don’t even like to think about it.”

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.