In his Yom Hashoah address, Yair Golan, the IDF’s deputy chief of staff, said that he was “frightened” by “signs” of similarities between Israeli society today and “revolting processes that occurred in Europe in general, and particularly in Germany” in the years before World War II. He further called for Yom Hashoah to be a national day of atonement on which to ponder abuses committed by Israeli soldiers. Ruthie Blum responds:

[Golan then made] a not-so-veiled reference to the controversy surrounding the manslaughter indictment of Elor Azaria, who killed a subdued Palestinian terrorist in Hebron on March 24 . . . : “The misuse of weapons . . . has occurred in the history of the IDF since its establishment. The IDF has always taken pride in its ability to investigate difficult events impartially and to take full responsibility for what is good, but also for what is bad and unacceptable.”

Indeed. So where is the need for penitence on Israel’s part? If Golan had an answer, he didn’t offer it. . . . Any calls for a collective mea culpa should have been directed exclusively and forcefully at the individuals and groups abroad who are enabling, supporting, and promoting anti-Semitism—by way of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel at campuses across the West; through old-style Jew-hatred on social media; to the British Labor party, so many of whose members have been spewing the sort of unthinkable vitriol that became taboo in Europe after World War II; and last, but certainly not least, through global jihad committed by radical Islamists within and surrounding Israel’s borders.

It is the job of the IDF brass to combat the last factor for the security of Israel’s citizens, not to imperil us by emboldening those who seek to undermine our very existence. Golan is the one who really ought to be soul-searching right now. . . .

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.