Nazi Germany produced an impressive output of feature films, some of them involving great technical sophistication and all of them serving propaganda purposes. The documentary Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy of Nazi Films contains clips from these movies together with the commentary of both historians and ordinary moviegoers who have seen them recently. Thomas Doherty writes in his review:

For not a few spectators, the seductive quality of the cinema breeds a fear that, if let loose, the Nazi films can be a gateway drug into the harder stuff. Filmed in shadows, a pair of former neo-Nazis confirms that the vintage Nazi fare is useful as bonding bait for new recruits, though even they scoff at The Eternal Jew as over the top. After watching The Jew Süss, [perhaps the most atrocious of anti-Semitic Nazi movies], a theater-full of French high-school kids is nearly unanimous in voting to ban it from television broadcasts: the susceptible masses need to be protected from material that should be reserved “for the educated bourgeoisie.” A man at a cinemathèque in Jerusalem demurs, arguing that The Jew Süss should be shown to every schoolchild in Israel, so they can be familiar with it, understand it, and “dispute and reject it.”

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.