Gertrude van Tijn was a German-born Dutch Zionist and feminist. In the 1930s, she worked tirelessly to help Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. A recent biography by Bernard Wasserstein focuses on her wartime activities, which involved the impossible moral choices that became all-too-common during the Holocaust. Saskia Coenen Snyder writes in her review:

[I]n 1941, the SS officer Klaus Barbie . . . demanded the names and addresses of Jewish students who had left the [work-village for Jewish refugees from Germany established by van Tijn]. Barbie vowed that he wanted the list so that the students could return [there], and, believing him, van Tijn provided him with the information—a decision she would regret for the rest of her life. The people on van Tijn’s list ended up among some 300 young Jewish men who were arrested and sent to Mauthausen. Few of them survived.

The following year, as head of the department called Help for the Departing, which fell under the umbrella of the [Netherlands’] Jewish Council, van Tijn witnessed the process of name selection and the drafting of deportation lists at the council’s headquarters in Amsterdam. . . . Van Tijn, having vowed never to hand over one more Jewish name after Barbie’s betrayal, distanced herself from the proceedings. In fact, Wasserstein found that she objected and submitted her resignation to [a council leader], who promptly declined to accept it. She remained a staff member—thereby exempt from deportation—of a highly controversial administrative body.

Wasserstein correctly points out that our judgment of van Tijn depends on what she really knew about the horrors in Poland in 1942 and 1943. Did her supply of baby diapers, boots, toothpaste, and blankets aid and comfort deportees in a time of need, or did the operation of the Help for the Departing contribute to the deception that Jews really were going to the East for labor service? Based on van Tijn’s personal records, Wasserstein leans toward the former and ultimately defends her, convinced that she . . . acted out of genuine humanitarian concerns for the well-being of her people under extraordinarily difficult circumstances.

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.