Although he considered himself a Christian writer, the Polish poet, novelist, essayist, and translator Józef Wittlin (1896–1976) was born to Jewish parents and wrote extensively on Jewish subjects during the 1930s and 40s. The city of Lwów (now L’viv, Ukraine), where he lived from his childhood until World War II, plays a major role in his writings, and a collection of his essays on the city has recently been published in English. Comparing Wittlin’s Lwów to the Odessa of the Russian-Jewish author Isaac Babel, Uilleam Blacker writes:

The NKVD, [precursor to the KGB], brought plain old nastiness [to both cities]—though it had existed before, in the pogroms, as described in Babel’s “A Story of My Dovecote.” The startling and bloody fate of the Jewish boy’s pigeons in this tale is surely one of the most shocking scenes in literary history. This kind of cruelty occurred in early 20th-century Europe wherever there was a combustible ethnic mix, which in prewar Eastern Europe was almost everywhere. L’viv was no exception. In 1918, after the Poles had defeated the Ukrainians in the fight for the city, there was a horrific pogrom, carried out largely by Polish soldiers in a sort of grotesque victory celebration.

In 1941, when the Soviets, who had occupied the city for two years, retreated before the advancing Germans, hundreds of dead bodies, executed in Soviet prisons, were dragged into the streets. The Jews were blamed for this, and another, much larger-scale pogrom ensued, this time carried out largely by local Ukrainians. As Wittlin notes with bitter irony, drawing a comparison with the pogroms inspired by the Ukrainian Cossack leader Bogdan Chmielnicki in the 17th century: “the cause of all wars and every kind of evil in the world did not change from Chmielnicki to Hitler.”

Knowledge of the fate of the Jewish inhabitants of these great cities of L’viv and Odessa casts a shadow over our readings of both authors. Wittlin doesn’t dwell on the matter, but neither does he shun it—it is always there, throbbing, like a hidden wound, underneath the superficial lightness of the text.

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.