Last month, the autonomous region of Murcia, located in southeastern Spain, signed an agreement with a Jewish organization to take steps to preserve the legacy of its Jewish history. The Jerusalem Post reports:

The agreement was signed . . . in the old synagogue of Lorca, unique among synagogues throughout Spain in that it was never converted into a church. Lorca is a city that served as the frontier town between Christian and Muslim Spain in Middle Ages, where Jews frequently served as intermediaries between the two communities.

Murcia had a rich and active Jewish past, with several notable Jews residing there, including [the 13th-century statesman] Moses ibn Turiel. Many of the port city’s Jews were historically involved in the maritime trade. It is speculated that these connections were ultimately important when the majority of Jews who fled overseas during the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 used the ports in the region to travel to other parts of the Mediterranean and beyond.

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.