The artist Marc Chagall left the Belarusian city of Vitebsk in 1922. Although he spent most of the remainder of his life in France and the U.S., scenes of Jewish life in his native city provided subject matter for much of his artistic work. Only recently, however, has Vitebsk begun to remember Chagall, as Celestine Bohlen writes:

Today, all that remains of [the artist’s] neighborhood is Chagall’s one-story childhood home, now an evocative museum that bears witness to a life once sheltered by family, tradition, and culture—all of it gone. Across the river, a handsome Chagall Arts Center holds a collection of his graphic works, donated by the artist’s family and friends.

Chagall’s legacy is publicly honored here today, but it took a long time. For half a century, long after his work had been celebrated around the world, he was scorned by the Soviet cultural establishment for both his dreamy modernism and his Jewishness. He was listed in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia as a “French painter and graphic artist.”

In 1987, on the centenary of his birth, at a time when Soviet taboos were being swept away by glasnost, a leading Moscow museum honored him with a major exhibition, but in Vitebsk, his name still inspired contempt. “Chagall doesn’t suit us politically,” said a local Communist boss back then. “He’s a Zionist.”

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.