The Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) has been widely considered the finest fighting force to take the field during World War I. In May 1918, command of Australian forces in Europe was given to General John Monash—a Jew. But Monash was not the only Australian Jew to distinguish himself on the battlefield. The Jewish Community Center in Canberra has just completed a memorial to the country’s Jewish war dead, as Katie Burgess writes:

A new national war memorial was unveiled [on Sunday] to remember the 341 Jewish servicemen who laid down their lives fighting for Australia, 100 years to the day since Monash was knighted on the battlefield. . . . Around 9,000 Australian Jewish men and women have served in Australia’s defense forces since the Boer War. Around 1,800 of those served in World War I.

Monash, an engineer and tactician of Prussian Jewish heritage, was the most famous of the Jewish servicemen who fought in the Great War. By the end of the war, Monash had been promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general and was knighted by King George V outside Villers-Bretonneux in the south of France. But despite this, Monash was denied the rank of field marshal in part because of his Jewish heritage. . . .

But . . . Monash [was] by no means the only exceptional Jewish military leader. There’s Lieutenant Leonard Maurice Keysor, who was awarded a Victoria Cross during the battle of Lone Pine in August 1915 [during the Gallipoli campaign]. For 50 hours he smothered bombs that landed in his trench or threw them back at Turkish soldiers, in some cases catching them mid-flight before lobbing them back at the Turks. Sergeant Issy Smith also won a Victoria Cross for carrying a wounded man 750 feet to safety under machine-gun and rifle fire during the second battle of Ypres [in 1915]. . . .

Then there are the heroes who did not make it back home. . . . Adolf [Hoffman] is one of the servicemen honored on the [memorial’s] cenotaph. The twenty-two-year-old navigator and bombardier died when his Lancaster bomber was shot down over Belgium on ANZAC Day [April 25] in 1944.

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.