July 16 saw the commemoration of the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup in Paris: the 1942 mass arrest, carried out by the French police on Nazi orders, of over 13,000 French Jews who were then shipped off to extermination camps. At the ceremony this year, French President Emmanuel Macron apologized for France’s actions and pledged to make France a country where the Jewish victims, among them over 4,000 children, would have wanted to live. 

But, writes Nidra Poller, the “tragic reality” is this: as shown most recently by the April murder of the sixty-five-year-old Sarah Halimi by a radicalized twenty-seven-year-old Muslim, France can’t and won’t fulfill that pledge:

If the descendants of those [murdered] children lived in France today, they might have to hide their kippot and Magen Davids, they might be harassed out of schools and neighborhoods, beaten up in the métro, accused of genocide against the Palestinians. If the descendants of those children lived in France today, the children hunted like animals by the French and exterminated by the Nazis, . . . they might be assassinated at a Jewish school in Toulouse [as in March 2012], their lives might be shattered by the savage murder of their grandmother in Paris in 2017. And who would be persecuting them? The descendants of immigrants and refugees from Arab-Muslim countries, the underprivileged victims of discrimination whom President Macron vows to protect [by means of the same] tender consideration that put a Kobili Traoré in the apartment downstairs of Sarah Halimi wthout first making sure he had integrated the values of the Republic.

[Unlike the situation in 1942], the French police did not pound on the door and drag Sarah Halimi from her home in the middle of the night. The police stood down, waiting interminably for reinforcements, while Kobili Traoré beat, smashed, and exterminated a defenseless Jewish woman.

The courage and lucidity to acknowledge the French crimes of the past falters in the face of French crimes of the present.

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.