Records of a Jewish presence in Crete date back to the 2nd century BCE. By the eve of World War II, there were only about 300 Jewish inhabitants of the island, nearly all of whom died in 1944 when the ship taking them to Auschwitz was hit by a British torpedo. Over the last decades, however, a Greek Jew named Nicholas Stavroulakis has rebuilt and revived the synagogue in Chania, Crete’s second largest city and the historic center of the Jewish community. Laura Lippstone writes:

The Etz Hayyim synagogue holds weekly Shabbat services and hosts a research library with some 4,000 volumes—which began with Stavroulakis’s personal collection. Next month, Etz Hayyim will honor both its past and its future. On June 14, it will host both its annual memorial service for the hundreds of Crete’s Jews lost during World War II, as well as an exhibit marking the twentieth anniversary of the reconstruction. . . .

The synagogue’s layout is in the Romaniote, or Judeo-Greek, tradition. The ark faces the eastern wall; the bimah [lectern], the western one. The reconstructed mikveh is fed by a spring. The scattered remains from some rabbinical tombs were recovered and reburied. And in a hallway near the sanctuary is a simple shrine: plaques bearing the names of the Jews of Chania who drowned in 1944.

Services are conducted in Hebrew, Greek, and English. Stavroulakis, who is not a rabbi, leads the Sabbath services, which typically draw about fifteen people. Others with long-term ties to Etz Hayyim, some of them ordained rabbis, are brought in for the High Holy Days.

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.