The capital city of the Spanish island of Majorca was once home to a thriving Jewish community, many of whose members converted to Catholicism in 1492 when Spain officially expelled its Jews. In recent decades their descendants have been returning to Judaism, and now the island boasts a community of some 200 souls and a synagogue, as Ayelet Mamo Shay writes:

In 1435, Palma de Mallorca’s Jewish community included some 4,000 people. Over the years it thrived and prospered, until [1492]. The Jews who did not flee . . . converted to Christianity [but] continued to observe their religion secretly, as [did other] anusim [forced converts] in Spain. In Palma de Mallorca, they were called chuetas (from the Catalan word for pigs).

One the one hand, they couldn’t live as Jews, but on the other hand, the Christians refused to accept them and treated them with much disrespect. They were humiliated and considered members of the lowest class. They were only allowed to marry among themselves, so since 1691 to this very day they have only married other descendants of anusim. . . .

Ironically, the derogatory term chuetas has become a source of pride for the descendants of anusim who are discovering their roots and seeking to return to their forefathers’ religion. Today, there are 20 to 30 [such people] on the island who are studying Jewish religious laws on a monthly basis with Rabbi Nissan Ben Avraham, an emissary of the Shavei Israel organization, who returned to the Jewish religion himself after finding out that his own family had kept the secret for many years.

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.