Situated adjacent to Islamabad, Rawalpindi is currently Pakistan’s fourth-largest city. It was also once home to a thriving Jewish community, of which only an abandoned synagogue remains, as Saif Tahir writes:

The history of Jews in Rawalpindi [begins in] 1839, when many Jewish families from [the Persian city of] Mashhad fled to [escape] persecution and settled in various parts of the subcontinent, including Peshawar and Rawalpindi. . . . According to the 1901 census and the Rawalpindi Gazette, the Mashhadi Jews were thriving [in the city at the beginning of the century]. However, after partition [in 1947], many families migrated to Mumbai and the rest left gradually in the late 1960s. . . .

The stunning building once used [by these Jews] as a synagogue and assembly hall is now in shambles. It is occupied by three families who refuse to talk to visitors and discourage them from looking inside. . . .

The locals are resistant to talking about the [erstwhile Jewish] community—some because of hatred, and some because of fear. . . . However, an old resident who was born in the neighborhood in the late 1930s said something astonishing: “There were Jews living in the city till the late 1990s. Although the family moved to some other city, they still come and visit these streets.”

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.