Having survived World War II, decades of neglect, and its partial destruction in a 1978 earthquake, Thessaloniki’s Monastiriotes synagogue has finally been restored. Its congregants simultaneously celebrated its reopening and Israeli independence day on May 15. Elias Messinas writes:

The synagogue was designed by the Czech Jewish architect Eli Ernst Levi and funded by families that moved to Thessaloniki from Monastir [in modern-day Macedonia]. . . . After World War II, it was at this synagogue that the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust held their first meetings. . . . The Monastiriotes synagogue was among the very few that survived the war, thanks to the intervention of the Red Cross, which used it as storehouse. . . .

[The restoration affected] every possible corner and detail of the synagogue: from hiding exposed wiring to revealing the original hidden decorative terrazzo floor tiles; from revealing original wall paintings to replacing and adding damaged decorative plaster decorations . . . to erecting again the [marble depiction of the Ten Commandments crowning the central arch of the synagogue façade, which had fallen off during the earthquake].

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.