In his celebrated study of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway singles out one practitioner—Sidney Franklin—as “a better, more scientific, more intelligent, and more finished matador than all but about six of the full matadors in Spain today.” Erol Araf describes Franklin’s career:

Hemingway intensely admired Sidney Franklin, a sublime bullfighter who was born in Brooklyn, New York to Orthodox Jewish parents. . . . When the Spanish Civil War erupted, Franklin sided with Francisco Franco, who was also among his admirers, and under whose aegis he continued to perform. Before the result of the war was determined, he tagged along as a paid interpreter while Hemingway and the director Joris Ivens filmed the classic documentary [of the war], The Spanish Earth.

He eventually fell out with Hemingway [after] casting his lot with [Franco’s] Phalange, [which] was simply reprehensible to the author. . . .

After the war, his days as a matador behind him, Franklin appeared in a few films in the U.S. and Mexico. . . . He wrote an autobiography, Bullfighter from Brooklyn, and he also was a close friend of the American actor and legend James Dean. . . . The “matador of the Torah,” as he was known in Spain, died in obscurity in a nursing home in New York in 1976.

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.