In early August 1991—just a few weeks before the abortive coup that ultimately led to the Soviet Union’s collapse—a delegation of Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis arrived in Moscow, where they were told by the Ukrainian branch of the KGB that it wished to give them the arrest records of Rabbi Levi Yitzḥak Schneerson (1878-1944). Schneerson’s son, Menachem Mendel, was at the time of the visit the Lubavitcher rebbe; so the delegates traveled to Kiev to learn more. Dovid Margolin writes:

Levi Yitzḥak had been the high-profile chief rabbi of Dnepropetrovsk [now Dnipro], Ukraine, from before the 1917 October Revolution, when the city was still known as Ekaterinoslav, right up to the evening in April of 1939 when he was arrested by a KGB precursor, the NKVD. After ten months of brutal interrogations in secret-police prisons he was sentenced to five years of exile in the remote, mosquito- and disease-infested village of Chi’ili, Kazakhstan, where it was cold and damp in the winter and stiflingly hot in the summer.

[A] vice-chairman of Ukraine’s KGB . . . told the rabbis that Levi Yitzḥak’s arrest and subsequent treatment had been the sin of his predecessors, and thus not [his organization’s] own. Nevertheless, wishing somehow to rectify these past misdeeds by offering closure to the Jewish people, he [wanted to hand over] the arrest files.

Schneerson’s rabbinic career was largely defined by his resistance to the Bolsheviks’ repression of Judaism during the 1920 and 30s, recounts Margolin:

Following arrest and subsequent exile from the Soviet Union of the then-Lubavitcher rebbe, [Menachem Mendel’s father-in-law Yosef Yitzḥak Schneerson], Levi Yitzḥak became one of the leading rabbinic figures in the Soviet Union. . . . From the pulpit, he called on his community members to keep their dedication to the Torah and its commandments. He collected funds to support the families of Jewish prisoners, ran a network of underground Jewish schools in Dnepropetrovsk, and oversaw the distribution of matzah he received from abroad. In 1936, he was involved with the construction of an illegal mikveh. . . . He led the Ukrainian rabbis’ refusal to sign pro-Soviet statements in the early 1930s.

Authorities did not take kindly to any of this. On March 28, 1939, just days before Passover, the NKVD arrested Rabbi Levi Yitzḥak. Over the next ten months, the venerable fifty-one-year-old rabbi was shuttled among secret police prisons in Dnepropetrovsk, Kiev, Kharkov, and Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. He was beaten and deprived of sleep. Some of his interrogations lasted fifteen or sixteen hours, followed by a break of two or three hours before starting again. He was charged with being an imperialist spy, funneling money from abroad, and conducting anti-Soviet provocations at home.

In 1992, the SBU—the KGB’s successor in newly independent Ukraine—formally apologized to Menachem Mendel Schneerson for his father’s arrest.

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.