Since 1960, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam has been the city’s only major monument to the destruction of its Jewish community during the Shoah. That changed this year, when the city council approved construction of a wall commemorating the approximately 102,000 Dutch Jews killed at the hands of the Nazis, and a National Holocaust Museum opened its doors. Nina Siegal describes the significance of these new efforts to preserve the realities of the country’s wartime history:

Between 75 and 80 percent of the Netherlands’ Jews were killed during the war, the highest rate in Western Europe. . . . By comparison, neighboring Belgium lost about 40 percent of its Jewish population, and France lost about 25 percent. . . .

Beginning in 1943, about 34,000 Dutch Jews were sent to the Sobibor death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, and only eighteen survived. . . . This relatively unknown camp accounted for about a third of the Dutch Jewish victims of the Holocaust . . . ; Auschwitz accounted for most of the others. . . .

The Anne Frank House, which had 1.2 million visitors last year, is one of the most popular attractions in the Netherlands. . . . But those who have promoted the new projects fear that people may come away from her [story] with the impression that most Dutch citizens were protective of their Jewish neighbors, and that the Dutch resistance was more effective than it was.

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.