During World War II, the Nazis and their collaborators routinely destroyed Jewish cemeteries, and in many instances used the headstones as pavement. Ongoing renovations in the Czech capital’s tourist district provides evidence that the Communist government of Czechoslovakia did something similar. Moreover, this didn’t happen during the Czechoslovakian Communist party’s orgy of anti-Semitism in 1952, but far more recently. Robert Tait writes:

Jewish leaders hailed the unearthing as proof of long-held suspicions that the Communist authorities . . . had taken stonework from Jewish burial sites for a much-vaunted pedestrianization of Wenceslas Square during the 1980s. The flagship project was showcased during a walkabout tour by the then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.

The names of the dead are unidentifiable because the headstones have been broken to form cobblestones. One person appears to have died in 1877, when Prague was part of the Habsburg empire, while the most recent death is shown to have happened in the 1970s, during the height of Communism. The stones appear to have been taken from different cemeteries.

Synagogues and cemeteries were allowed to fall into disrepair under an officially sanctioned hostile policy towards religious institutions in general and Judaism in particular, making them vulnerable to looting. František Bányai, the chairman of Prague’s Jewish community, [said that] “more Jewish synagogues were destroyed in the area of the current Czech Republic during Communist times than under the Nazis.”

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.