In the summer of 1933, the violinist Ernest Drucker, a student at a conservatory in Cologne, was selected to play a Brahms concerto at his graduation ceremony. At the demand of the Nazis, he was forced to halt after the first movement. His son Eugene recently performed the work at a special concert in Israel in honor of Nazi Germany’s Jewish musicians, as Aron Heller writes:

With tears in his eyes, [Eugene] Drucker performed an emotional rendition of the Brahms Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77 over the weekend with the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra.

“I think he would feel a sense of completion. I think in some ways many aspects of my career served that purpose for him,” the sixty-three-year-old Drucker said of his father, who passed away in 1993. “There is all this emotional energy and intensity loaded into my associations with this piece.”

Thursday’s concert, and a second performance Sunday night, commemorated the Jüdischer Kulturbund—a federation of Jewish musicians in Nazi Germany who were segregated so as not to “sully” Aryan culture. After the humiliation in Cologne, the elder Drucker became a central player in the Kulturbund, a unique historical phenomenon with a mixed legacy.

On the one hand, it gave Jews the opportunity to carry on with their cultural lives and maintain a sense—some would say the illusion—of normalcy in the midst of growing discrimination against them. On the other, it served a Nazi propaganda machine eager to portray a moderate face to the world.

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.