September 29 and 30 marked the 75th anniversary of the massacres of Babi Yar, during which the Nazis, with help from local auxiliaries, slaughtered the entire Jewish population of Kiev, numbering some 33,000 souls. Subsequently, German forces used the site to murder Jews from elsewhere, Ukrainian nationalist and Communist leaders, Soviet prisoners of war, and Roma. At a ceremony commemorating the massacres, the Ukrainian bishop Borys Gudziak addressed the Ukrainian parliament on the need to prevent hatred from ever again becoming “a guiding spirit for politics”:

Babi Yar is a tragedy for all humanity, because in it human dignity was trampled and the ultimate value of human life was negated. . . . For decades, the history of Babi Yar, like the history of the Holodomor [the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, during which millions died as a result of Stalinist policies], was hushed up and ignored, erased from the chronicles.

A terrifying symbol of this perfidious camouflage was the Kuren tragedy of 1961. To erase the memory of Babi Yar, literally cover it geographically, Soviet authorities perpetrated a landslide that buried more than a thousand innocent lives. This pattern was repeated.

The Nazis destroyed Jews physically, and the Communists obliterated their memory. The latter were so successful that today many think that Jews with their rich millennia-old spirituality, culture, and social life were never in Ukraine, that they were not our fellow countrymen, that our grandmothers and grandfathers did not recognize in the Jews who marched to their executions their own neighbors and acquaintances.

In fact, Babi Yar is our common history. It is the history of all Ukraine, not only of the Jewish people. They were, after all, Kievans, Lvivites, Odessans, Vinnytsians. In almost every city and town in Ukraine, there is a yar—a ravine or ditch in front of which people were executed only because they were Jews. . . . We must recover the names of the victims and return their memory to their descendants, to us all.

We must recognize when [Gentile] Ukrainians were offenders. Such cases were, unfortunately, not few in number. At the same time, we cannot forget about the role of the many Ukrainian righteous ones, who, risking everything, saved the life and dignity of Jews. Eminent among these righteous ones is Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, the Greek Catholic Archbishop of Lviv. There were also righteous ones on a simple, everyday level, such as both of my grandmothers who delivered food to Jews hiding from the Nazis. He and they serve for us as an example and a source of hope. The fact that we are proud of our righteous ones argues that their behavior, stance, and courage should become ours.

The events of the 20th century are a trauma for our people that we must and can overcome. We are called to live, to leave behind the syndrome of trauma and victimization, to which we are once again driven by Vladimir Putin, the war in the East, and the perverse populism today spreading through countries and continents. It is necessary to include Babi Yar in our history and our consciousness, in the history of Eastern Europe, in the history of the world, so that such a tragedy may never be repeated. So that hatred may never become a guiding spirit for politics, deadly ideologies, and homicidal passion.

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.