To commemorate the 500th anniversary of the establishment of the Venice ghetto—a restricted area of Jewish settlement that gave subsequent ghettos its name—Jerusalem’s Israel Museum is displaying artifacts that show how Venetian Jews flourished despite the widespread anti-Semitism that led to their segregation. Eli Mendelbaum writes:

One of the more moving artifacts is a curtain from 1601, . . . displaying symbols from the family to which it belonged—the Cohen family. The curtain is embroidered with silk and gold thread on velvet fabric and reads: “Alms for God, in honor of Dr. Joseph Cohen.” The curtain is embroidered with a coat of arms, hands [formed as when making] the priestly blessing, and five small medallions in a decorative pattern.

“This is an opportunity to experience spiritual and cultural creativity, despite the limitations imposed upon them,” said [the curator, Gioia] Sztulman. “Patchwork velvet is a technique typical of the 16th and 17th centuries in general and Venice in particular. Trading in second-hand fabrics was also one of the few professions Jews were allowed to engage in, apart from usury and medicine. Due to their availability, Jewish ritual items were made of the most luxurious of fabrics.”

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.