The opening months of World War I brought unmitigated disaster to Russian Jewry as the tsar’s army, blaming them for its own failures, punished Jews with massacres and expulsions. Then, in the latter half of 1915, much of the Pale of Settlement—where Russian Jews were concentrated—fell under a German military occupation that, while rarely anti-Semitic, was both harsh and immiserating. The war’s end brought even bloodier slaughter as various armies competed for mastery in Eastern Europe. Taking the city of Vilna as his prime example, Andrew Koss discusses with Avi Woolf the Jewish experience during the war and its aftermath. (Audio, 70 minutes.)

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.