In the early 1970s, the American movement to ease the plight of Jews in the USSR was in its early stages, while among British Jews there was little interest in the subject at all. Barbara Oberman, a thirty-three-year-old Jewish housewife, decided to change that, writes Abigail Klein Leichman:

[First], Oberman tried to persuade the Board of Deputies of British Jews to commit itself to helping Soviet Jews. “They more or less told me to go home and bake cakes,” she recalls. . . . In May 1971, Oberman began recruiting women brave enough to go against the grain and form a grassroots movement that came to be known as “the 35s.” The name referred not only to the approximate age and number of the women involved but also, and more importantly, to Raiza Palatnik, a thirty-five-year-old Jewish woman who had been imprisoned in an isolation cell five months earlier in Odessa.

Palatnik’s case galvanized the young mothers. Dressed in black, they demonstrated outside the Soviet embassy in London demanding Palatnik’s release, which finally happened in December 1972.

At first, the 35s were a thorn in the side of the Jewish establishment. . . . Oberman’s style of protest was headline-grabbing. For a demonstration against Soviet Communist leader Alexander Shelepin, who was in England for a visit, Oberman declared that the ladies would haunt him. Her husband’s factory made them white “ghost robes,” which they wore outside in the freezing cold. “It was raining, and the red lettering on our signs ran, and that was very effective in the photographs,” she notes.

Like many of the refuseniks whose cause she championed, Oberman eventually settled in Israel, where she lives to this day.

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.