Every Ramadan (this year, April 23–May 23), TV networks throughout the Arab world air special miniseries for the holy month. While Egyptian television currently features a sci-fi drama imagining a future where Israel has been destroyed, a Saudi Arabian channel is broadcasting something very different. Hussein Ibish, noting that Ramadan programs “present one of the most interesting bellwethers of popular culture in the Middle East,” explains:

The dramatic series Um Haroun constitutes a significant breakthrough in Arab popular-culture representations of Jewish-Arab relations. . . . Set in an unnamed Gulf country that most closely resembles Kuwait, it tells the story of how ties between Jewish and Arab communities were snapped by the creation of Israel in 1948.

Rather than casting Israel and Jews as malign elements that ought to be extirpated from the Middle East, as [Arab] TV shows sometimes do, it takes a more nuanced reading of region’s recent history and current realities. It is a humanizing and sympathetic portrait of the Jews of the Arab world, a wistful account of what was lost on all sides when these communities left for Israel.

The showrunners had to navigate past censorship (and cultures of self-censorship) in multiple jurisdictions, meaning a lot of authorities signed off on [it]. But the show shouldn’t be dismissed as an officially approved effort to shift public opinion for purposes of geopolitical expediency. It is a genuine reflection of a generational shift in attitudes: many young Arabs already sense that Israel and Jewish nationalism are a natural and non-pathological part of a regional environment that contains significant and legitimate non-Arab power centers.

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.