Fiamma Nirenstein grew up in Italy, lived in Israel for two decades as a correspondent for Italian newspapers, and served in the Italian parliament from 2008 to 2013. She has now been appointed Israel’s ambassador to Italy. Some Italian Jews have reportedly protested that her appointment raises questions about their own fealty to the Italian state. Ruthie Blum responds:

[Nirenstein] has never concealed her passion for Israel, a country she says is “filled with heroes.” And human ‎rights. And the ability to retain its democratic principles even while forced, repeatedly, to go to war. ‎Conveying this message is precisely what an Israeli envoy abroad should be doing. One who speaks ‎the language and knows the culture of the country to which he is dispatched makes such a mission ‎even more effective.‎

The only thing remotely problematic about Nirenstein’s appointment, then, lies in the irony that her ‎recent official immigration to Israel is accompanied by returning to Italy for the next few years. Now ‎she will do so after relinquishing her Italian citizenship, however, as is required of Israeli diplomats ‎born [outside the country].‎

If the Jewish community in Italy is worried about backlash from this move, it is not Nirenstein they ‎should be countering, but rather the anti-Semitic climate that is causing their angst. In any case, she ‎claims that reports of its hysteria are being widely exaggerated, judging by the massive amount of ‎enthusiasm she has encountered—on the part of Italian Jews and non-Jews across the political and ‎cultural spectrum—since the announcement of her appointment.‎

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.