Born in the city or Lodz in Russian-ruled Poland, William (a/k/a Wolf) Fisher immigrated to the United Kingdom, became a British subject, and distinguished himself serving on the Western front during World War I. Then his career took a more unusual turn, as recent research reveals. Marc Goldberg writes:

On December 8, 1925, the French secret police arrested three British subjects, John Leather, Oliver Phillips, and Fisher, along with two young French women. The Britons were accused of, and later convicted for, recruiting the two women to spy on various naval and aviation installations. Publicly, the British government denied all knowledge of the ring; privately the British ambassador to France, Robert Crewe-Milnes, wrote that the evidence implicating the men as British spies was “absolutely damning.”

The espionage ring collapsed when one of the two French accomplices, Marthe Moreuil, was arrested and confessed to her role in stealing secrets on behalf of Great Britain. Moreuil had infiltrated French air force and naval facilities, even qualifying as a parachutist to gain access. It also emerged in court that Moreuil was Fisher’s lover. The press referred to her as “Mademoiselle Foxtrot,” claiming that she secreted documents out of French bases in her corsets.

For his role in the plot, Fisher was sentenced to two years in prison.

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.