The hero of the Soviet Union’s most popular animated series was an adorable but mysterious “beast of unknown origin” named Cheburashka. To Maya Balakirsky Katz, Cheburashka’s rootlessness, his inability to fit into bureaucratic classification systems—in an early episode he is rejected by the zoo since its staff doesn’t know which cage to put him in—and even the fact that he resembles but most definitely is not a bear (the symbol of Russia), all suggest that he is a symbolic Jew. Such an interpretation becomes more persuasive given the men behind the cartoon:

[T]he series’ creative team was made up almost entirely of Yiddish-speaking Jews who had lost their families and homes in the [Holocaust]. The director, Roman Kachanov, . . . was born in a poor Jewish neighborhood in the city of Smolensk and pursued boxing in the cultural atmosphere of Smolensk’s Labor Zionist movement before his father and sister were murdered point-blank at a nearby execution site. Cheburashka’s puppet designer, Lev Shvartsman, raised in the Zionist youth culture of Minsk, changed his name to “Israel” after the 1967 war despite official hostility toward the Jewish state.

Kachanov recruited Teodor Bunimovich, a [Jewish] photojournalist who recorded many frontline documentaries of Nazi atrocities in Belarus, as his cameraman. The series’ operator Iosif Golomb not only spoke fluent Yiddish but his father was an avid collector of ḥasidic music. . . . [I]t stands to reason that the myriad rejections that Cheburashka endures as a consequence of his “unknown origins” resonated [with the creators] on a personal level. . . .

Cheburashka’s mysterious origins provide one of the central intrigues of the series. . . . The first episode opens with a fruit vendor opening up a crate of oranges and finding an adorable cross between a brown bear and an imported orange. . . . Not coincidently, Israel was the main source of orange imports to the Soviet Union. More to the point, Jaffa oranges were the signature export of the Jewish state. Indeed, Jaffa oranges were the only product that the Soviet Union imported from Israel and were the source of both national pride, representing productive Jewish labor in a country of their own, and, for Soviet Jews, anxiety as the ultimate symbol of Zionism.

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.