In 1975, the U.S. Canada, and most European states—the Soviet Union included—signed the Helsinki accords, which, although meant to foster détente between the Eastern bloc and the West, also included an agreement to respect universal human rights. A year later—40 years ago yesterday—a group of Soviet dissidents founded the Moscow Helsinki Group to hold their government accountable for its violations of these rights. Natan Sharansky, one of the group’s founders, reflects on what it and other similar organizations achieved, and the lessons for today’s Western leaders:

Step by step . . . our struggle gained momentum. . . . [A] powerful network of governmental and non-governmental monitoring groups was created, and as a result the Soviet Union was effectively cornered—it could not simply impose its own interpretation of Helsinki’s [human-rights provisions] on the rest of the world. This non-binding agreement thereby became one of the strongest weapons haunting the regime until its death.

Today, as many in the West push for conciliatory agreements with regimes no less oppressive than the USSR, it is worth recalling that the KGB and the philosophy of Realpolitik were not the only opponents we faced in our struggle back then. Another major obstacle was the peace movement, those thousands of well-meaning Westerners demanding to remove American missiles from Europe and to appease the Soviet Union in the name of avoiding war. . . . Make sure the Helsinki process avoids nuclear war, they said, and then we can speak about the rights of Soviet citizens.

Our answer to these unsophisticated idealists was equally clear: the highest human value is not peace simply, but peace in conditions of freedom. If peace were the ultimate good, dictatorships would exist forever, because no one would endanger his life fighting for basic rights. . . .

If we remember one lesson on the 40th anniversary of the Helsinki Group, then, let it be this: we should not be led into complacency by agreements that promise peace with dictatorships without demanding internal change. If we don’t continue standing up for dissidents and for the shared values they represent, we will soon find ourselves as much at the mercy of their oppressors as they are.

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.