In the 1920s and 30s, Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner brothers, and other Jews who had settled in Los Angeles played a major role in creating Hollywood and the movie business as we know it today. Some 100 years later, it is the Jewish state that is doing much to redefine entertainment. It began when Israeli shows were adapted for American audiences, producing such series as Homeland. Now Israeli shows like Fauda are simply being streamed on thousands of small screens around the world with subtitles. The Israeli-American writer and producer Alon Aranya, who has been involved in many of these programs, discusses the appeal of Israeli television, as well as one of his latest projects, a spy thriller titled Tehran. (Interview by Shmuel Rosner. Audio, 40 minutes.)

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.