In 1942, Allied forces invading Algeria, then under the control of Vichy France, cooperated with a group of mostly Jewish local resistance fighters. The story is the subject of a new Israeli film, Night of Fools, directed by Rami Kimchi. Eliezer Hayon explains:

“The [Algerian] underground numbered 800 fighters, half of them Jewish. But at the moment of truth, 400 of them had cold feet, and just 400 were left—almost all of them Jewish,” says [one of their commanders, Jacques] Zermati. They were led by José Aboulker, the Jewish head of the underground. . . .

The plan was simple, yet almost surreal: Allied forces would land on the coast of north-western Africa, and the underground would take care of paralyzing the regime’s troops in order to hand over the city of Algiers to the Allies. It might sound simple enough, until one takes into account the fact that there were just 400 underground fighters, and 200,000 Vichy and Axis soldiers.

How did they do it? The resistance, with the help of some sympathetic Vichy officers, disguised themselves as French troops and succeeded in rounding up the entire French garrison without firing a shot. And why did they do it? Kimchi’s answer:

“The Jews in Algeria were proud of their French citizenship, and even today they live in France. But the film shows that Jewish motivation was a dominant factor. This was a war against the fascists, but what motivated them was not just French identity, otherwise they would have withdrawn like the other 400 fighters.”

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.