Born in Austrian Galicia in 1881, Israel Zolli (né Zoller) studied at the rabbinical seminary in Florence and later served as the rabbi of Trieste and then Rome. Although he authored a scholarly study of the New Testament, published in 1938, few of his congregants expected that he, along with his wife, would convert to Catholicism less than a decade later. Shalom Goldman writes:

Italian Jews had faced official discrimination beginning in 1938, but they were not threatened with extermination until German forces moved into Italy after Mussolini’s fall in 1943. When the Nazis [seized] Rome, Zolli and his family went into hiding with a Catholic family. The presidents of the synagogue and the community, however, expected Zolli to remain in public view, and they criticized the rabbi for shirking his leadership role. Zolli responded with the assertion that the Germans certainly would have killed him as soon as they found him, just as they had systematically killed the chief rabbis of other Italian cities. Regardless of the dangers Zolli and his family may have faced during the war, Zolli’s postwar critics considered his apostasy to be an act of retribution against a community that had criticized his behavior during the German occupation.

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.