Following World War I, the formerly German port of Danzig (modern-day Gdansk, Poland) was made a “free city,” separated from Germany by a sliver of Polish territory. Adolf Hitler manufactured a conflict with Poland over this anomalous situation as a pretext for invading 80 years ago Sunday. Colin Shindler describes the situation of the city’s Jews at the time:

After the upheavals of the World War I, Danzig had become a temporary location for stateless and persecuted Jews, seeking a better life elsewhere. Many were encamped in a special transit facility on the city’s outskirts where they were helped by Danzig’s Jewish community. In the 1920s, some 60,000 homeless Jews passed through.

The Nazi virus, after infecting Weimar Germany, was soon exported to Danzig’s German citizens. . . . In May 1933, the Nazis won power in Danzig through a democratic election. . . . One tactic used by the Nazis was to create a split between the acculturated German-Jewish leadership and the [more] traditional Ostjuden from Poland. [Yet they refused] to denounce each other. Even so, by 1937, 3,000 Jews had left.

In October 1937, the local Nazis announced that they could not guarantee the rights of foreign-born Jews. A year later, Kristallnacht resulted in the burning down of two synagogues and the desecration of two others. . . . On January 2, 1939, laws excluding Jews from economic life and the professions came into force in Danzig. Deportations began shortly afterward.

When war broke out on September 1, German troops seized Danzig in a matter of hours:

The following day, the Nazis established the first concentration camp outside German borders at Stutthof, 30 miles from Danzig. It was also the last camp to be liberated by the Allies, on May 9, 1945. Over 60,000 died there in the intervening period—half of them 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.