In his recent movie Heroes, the Israeli filmmaker Avishai Mekonen tells the story of the Ethiopian Jewish activists who campaigned for permission to leave for Israel, often risking the ire of their country’s brutal socialist regime, and worked to convince the Israeli government and American Jewry to help them emigrate. He discusses the film here. (Interview by Be’chol Lashon.)

[T]here is a whole part of the story [of Ethiopian Jewry] that is not well known, the story of the Ethiopian activists who held onto the dream of going to Jerusalem and made everything happen. . . . I want people to know the names of Yona Bogale, Gedalia Uria, Ester Hollander, and others. Some 440 Ethiopian activists and kessim [the local term for rabbis] were jailed in Ethiopia. So many risked their lives. For example, Ferede Aklum, . . . who endangered himself to find escape routes for the community from Ethiopia [to Israel] through Sudan, and worked with the Mossad.

These activists had no money, no guides, no equipment. They had a dream and they made it happen. Many of these people were put in jail for days or months because leaving Ethiopia was illegal. They were beaten and tortured. Some died in jail. Those who were released did not give up. These people were true heroes.

Yona Bogale was the first Ethiopian to reach out to the west and explain the danger the Beta Israel experienced. In the 1950s, he sent young Ethiopians to Israel to learn Hebrew, English, math, and science. Those students became leaders [of Ethiopian] Jewry who could communicate [with people in Israel, the U.S., and elsewhere].

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.