Best known for its annual ice-sculpture festival, the Chinese city of Harbin—located near both North Korea and Siberia—was largely founded by Russian Jews, who made up a large share of its population for the first decades of its existence, and owned 80 percent of its real estate. Dara Horn, having returned from a visit to the city, recounts its history:

Harbin today is larger than New York, with a population around 10 million. But as late as 1896, there was no Harbin, only a cluster of small fishing villages around a bend in a river. That year Russia received a concession from China to build part of the Trans-Siberian Railroad through Manchuria—the traditional name for the vast, frigid, and at that time, barely populated region of northeastern China. . . . The route would also include a branch line deeper into China, requiring a large administrative center at the junction. . . .

With an enormous investment to protect, railroad officials quickly realized that they could not depend on local warlords or Siberian peasants to create this not-yet-existent town. They needed experienced Russian-speaking entrepreneurs. But who would ever want to move to Manchuria? That was when the railroad’s administrator, General Dmitri Khorvat, hit on a genius idea: . . . just tell the Jews that they can live free of anti-Semitic restrictions, he argued to the regime in St. Petersburg, without learning a new language or becoming bottom-feeders in New York’s sweatshops. The only catch was that they’d have to move to Manchuria.

The regime reluctantly agreed. So did hundreds, and then thousands, of Russian Jews.

By 1920 Harbin was home to some 20,000 Jews, two synagogues, a variety of Jewish institutions, and myriad Jewish-owned businesses. Yet by this point the Jewish community’s decline had already begun. First Harbin became a refuge for viciously anti-Semitic opponents of the Russian revolution, then it was taken over successively by the Japanese (who allied with these anti-Semites), the Soviets (who sent prominent surviving Jews to the gulag), and Maoist China (which expropriated whatever property its predecessors had failed to plunder). Horn describes the Chinese government’s efforts to make the city into a destination for Jewish tourists:

There is a tourist-industry concept, popular in places largely devoid of Jews, called “Jewish Heritage Sites.” The term is a truly ingenious piece of marketing. “Jewish Heritage” is a phrase that sounds utterly benign, or to Jews, perhaps ever so slightly dutiful, suggesting a place that you surely ought to visit—after all, you came all this way, so how could you not? It is a much better name than “Property Seized from Dead or Expelled Jews.”

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.