The recent Polish-language film Demon, a joint Polish-Israeli production loosely inspired by S. An-Sky’s classic play the The Dybbuk, tells the story of a foreigner named Python who comes to his Polish fiancée’s hometown for their wedding. (The two met while living in Britain.) Upon arriving, he discovers, or believes he discovers, human remains on the estate of his father-in-law-to-be, and is subsequently possessed by the spirit of a local Jewish woman killed during World War II, possibly on the day of her own wedding. J. Hoberman writes in his review:

Demon is more a Polish than a Jewish story. The land where Python finds himself is variously visualized as a massive construction site, in which things seem more likely to be buried than excavated, and a mysterious ruin wherein revelers reenact intricate folk rituals. . . .

An-Sky’s play is the ur-text for a tendency in Jewish art and literature that the Yiddish scholar Jeffrey Shandler has called “haunted modernism.” Literary examples include [the works of] Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Isaac Bashevis Singer; the best-known painters [to exhibit this tendency] are Marc Chagall and Natan Altman who, at least in their early work, were possessed by an uncanny past. Even before the Holocaust, the displacement and violent destruction of an ancient collective past prompted many writers, artists, and performers to view the vanished or vanishing traditional communities in which they originated as essentially ghostly—and therefore to reimagine these rural towns and urban ghettos as fantastic landscapes or haunted graveyards. . . .

This Jewish intimation of a past that, however lost, will not remain buried has also been experienced by some non-Jewish Central European artists.

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.