Shortly after his release from the gulag in 1986, Natan Sharansky—who had been imprisoned for requesting to leave the Soviet Union for Israel—traveled to the U.S., where he met the late Senator John McCain for the first time. Sharansky recalls that first meeting, which, he says, formed a lasting mutual affinity:

“I understand why you refused to be released on the USSR’s terms two years ago,” [McCain] told me then, referring to a deal I had rejected, to the shock and consternation of many Western supporters. Many couldn’t understand why I refused to request an early release from prison for health reasons. After all, the Soviet authorities had secretly promised their American counterparts that they would grant such a request.

McCain, who experienced the horrors of captivity and dictatorship at first hand, understood what they couldn’t. He knew how such a request would have been presented by the Soviet authorities, how they would have used it to claim that I, their critic, accepted their authority to control my fate. He knew how it would have been used to break the spirit of other dissidents.

McCain understood my reasons because he himself had made the same choice. When the North Vietnamese government offered to release him ahead of other POWs, he declined, despite the atrocious conditions in which he was held. Some values, he knew, stood above survival and comfort.

McCain’s first-hand knowledge of these realities and truths shone through his endeavors throughout his long and illustrious political career. He never stopped supporting dissidents who suffered under dictatorial regimes, and he never forgot that some things should take precedence over considerations of Realpolitik and party lines. . . .

The American people lost a man of rare integrity this week, and I lost a very dear comrade-in-arms. May his legacy live on.

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.