In the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Gentile prisoners were privileged in comparison with Jews, insofar as they were to be worked and starved to death more slowly, and were less likely to be shot or gassed. Among them was a Pole named Aleksander Kulisiewicz, who was arrested by the SS in 1940 for writing newspaper articles critical of the Nazis. Not long after his arrival at Sachsenhausen camp, Kulisiewicz befriended a Jewish inmate named Martin Rosenberg, who was the conductor of a clandestine choir. Makana Eyre writes

As soon as an opportunity arose, he snuck into block 37 to watch one of the choir’s secret rehearsals. He stood in the back of the room, up against a wall. Some 30 men were arrayed before him, warming up their voices. All of them wore the Star of David. . . . The men didn’t seem to be professional musicians, but that didn’t matter. Their conductor knew how to draw out the best possible sound. He would stop the men’s singing to adjust the division of voices, making sure there were four strong groups—altos, tenors, basses, and basso profundos—able to sing in harmony. He assigned each man to a group based on the tone, timbre, and range of his voice.

All the while, Kulisiewicz composed his own songs, putting new lyrics to melodies he remembered from his youth. He did it for entertainment and to avoid thinking about the camp’s conditions. He also used music to create a record of life in Sachsenhausen.

As a child, Kulisiewicz had developed an exceptional capacity for memorization in order to overcome a stutter. He put this talent to use:

[Kulisiewicz] couldn’t write the songs down. Doing so would mean punishment, even death. Nothing could be saved—except in his memory. [He] began to build a catalog of music and poetry. At first much of it was his. But some pieces came from [the Jewish] choir, and over time they increasingly came from other prisoners. A man in the barracks after a long day of “sport,” [the SS’s terms for the brutal daily exercise routines], would begin to sing, and Kulisiewicz would listen, committing the words and melody to memory.

Soon, his power of memory became as well-known as his musical skill. Prisoners started coming to him, asking that he remember their songs.

[When Rosenberg] feared that the Jews had little time left, he told Kulisiewicz that he saw omens that he was sure presaged their deaths. One evening in early October 1942, he came to Kulisiewicz. “You are not a Jew,” he said. “If you survive, you must sing my song of bitterness and revenge, my death song. You have to sing it all around the world, or else I will curse you and you won’t be able to die in peace.” Kulisiewicz promised he would.

Kulisiewicz indeed survived and spent much of his life after the war writing down and recording the songs, and performing them wherever he could.

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.