In 1995, when Serbia was still at war with its neighbors and engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosnian Muslims, its government established a memorial at the Staro Sajmište concentration camp in Belgrade, which had been established by the Nazis in 1942. The inscription notes that its “victims were mostly Serbs, Jews, and Roma,” although in fact the vast majority of those put to death there came from the latter two groups. As Liam Hoare writes, this detail reveals much about the way the Holocaust is remembered in Serbia—a country where many fought against the Nazis, but that also produced numerous collaborators:

“The narrative in Serbia is that we were an anti-Nazi country, which in part is right. But we had a Nazi-Serbian government in Belgrade and concentration camps. Children don’t really learn about that,” [said the head of an organization trying to expand Holocaust education in Serbia]. . . . In Serbian textbooks, “Jews are mentioned but not as the focal point of the Nazi regime.” . . .

Serbian schoolchildren are far more likely to know about the Jasenovac concentration camp, established by the fascist Ustaše movement [in] Croatia in August 1941, than about Staro Sajmište. Present estimates . . . show that between 77,000 and 99,000 people were put to death in Jasenovac between 1941 and 1945, around half of whom were Serbs . . . .

The emphasis on Jasenovac . . . serves an ulterior purpose. In electing to emphasize Serbian suffering at Croatian hands over Jewish and Roma suffering in Serbia, the government has been attempting to construct a national identity that places victimhood at the heart of the Serbian narrative [while emphasizing the wrongdoing of its enemies], in this case Croatia.

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.