On December 24, 1942, the Jewish boxing champion Barney Ross and Reverend Fred Gehring—a Catholic priest from Brooklyn, NY—organized an ecumenical midnight mass for Christian marines in the midst of the battle of Guadalcanal. Ross, whose European-born father had wanted him to be a talmudic scholar, had retired from boxing before the war began. Having enlisted in the Marines, he struck up a close friendship with Gehring, who was in his unit. Ron Grossman tells the story:

In mid-December, Ross found himself and other GIs trapped in a foxhole surrounded by the enemy. The only one not wounded, he held the Japanese at bay by firing his weapon and throwing grenades all night long. By morning, he and another Marine were the only ones alive. So he carried his buddy back to the American base.

But in the runup to Christmas in 1942, he was preoccupied with a favor the priest had asked of him. Gehring played the violin and found a portable organ. Ross was the only one who could play it, so Gehring asked if he would play “Silent Night” on Christmas Eve.

Ross said the only problem was he didn’t know the tune. . . . So Marines hummed it for him until he could play it by ear. At midnight Mass, the war momentarily seemed far away as Ross accompanied hundreds of Marines singing, “All is calm, all is bright.”

In the silence that followed, the priest asked Ross to do an encore. Perhaps something from his tradition? He chose “My Yiddishe Mama,” [a staple of Yiddish vaudeville], which had been his boxing theme song and had been played as he shadowboxed and danced his way from a stadium’s dressing room to the ring.

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.