Diet Eman died last week in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the age of ninety-nine. Born in The Hague, Eman left Europe after World War II and lived in the U.S. for many years before becoming a citizen in 2007. It was only in 1990 that she began to speak publicly about her wartime experiences, which Sam Roberts describes in an obituary:

[W]hen, in May 1940, the Germans, hours after Hitler had vowed to respect Dutch neutrality, invaded the Netherlands, . . . some of [Eman’s] neighbors, fellow churchgoers, argued that for whatever reason, God in his wisdom must have willed the German invasion. But Eman—herself so deeply religious that she would leave assassinations, sabotage, and, for the most part, even lying to others—could find no justification for such evil.

She and her then-boyfriend, Hein Seitsma, joined a Resistance group. They began by spreading news received on clandestine radios from the British Broadcasting Corporation, then smuggling downed Allied pilots to England, either by boat across the North Sea or more circuitously through Portugal. [In 1942], a plea for help by Herman van Zuidan, a Jewish co-worker of Eman’s, prompted her Resistance group to focus on stealing food- and gas-ration cards, forging identity papers, and sheltering hundreds of fugitive Jews. . . .

Eman delivered supplies and moral support to one apartment in The Hague that in late 1942 housed 27 Jews in hiding. The walls were paper thin. Crying babies and even flushing a toilet risked raising the suspicions of neighbors. [Yet] each time some of the Jews there were smuggled out to isolated farms outside the city, Eman returned to find that the woman had taken in more refugees. . . .

Eman was [eventually caught and] interned in the Vught concentration camp in the southern Netherlands, but after stubbornly insisting that she was simply a callow housemaid, she was released three months later, in August 1944. She immediately rejoined the Resistance and remained with it until May 1945, when she mounted a tank and directed Canadian liberators to die-hard German snipers only days before Germany surrendered.

Seitsma was not so lucky: he was caught and taken by the Gestapo to the Dachau concentration camp, where he was tortured and killed.

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.