Since Narendra Modi became prime minister of India in 2014, his country’s relationship with Israel has warmed considerably. This development can be credited in part to the rapport between Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu and in part to the generally pro-Israel stance of Modi’s Hindu-nationalist BJP party, which, when previously in power, took steps to reverse New Delhi’s traditional pro-Arab stance. But actually, argues Harry Hoshovsky, the relationship is not dependent on any one party or leader, but is the result of long-term changes:

[I]t was under the leadership of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao [of the long-dominant Indian National Congress (INC)] that India established full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992. Given prior Indian hostility or indifference toward Israel, diplomatic normalization was a major shift in Indian foreign policy toward the Middle East. The end of the cold war and the initiation of the Oslo peace process afforded New Delhi the opportunity to recalibrate its engagement with both Israel and the Palestinians. Normalization allowed for increased economic, cultural, and security cooperation between Israel and India, while still allowing [the latter] to advocate on behalf of the Palestinians. . . .

After the BJP lost power in 2004, there were concerns that the INC-led [coalition] might roll back some of the diplomatic gains. These fears proved largely unfounded: the government deepened and broadened India’s relationship with Israel, . . . because of an important ideological shift in India regarding its diplomatic balancing act vis-à-vis Israel and the Palestinian Authority: . . . starting in 2004, [India] quietly started to disconnect [its] foreign-policy calculations toward Israel from the vagaries of the peace process.

[In addition], Modi’s anticipated visit to Israel [which will be a first] represents a historic opportunity to accomplish two interconnected foreign-policy objectives. India will demonstrate to its Arab partners that a new era of Indo-Israeli relations is under way. And by establishing a new diplomatic status quo, Modi and the BJP will make it very challenging for the INC or any other political party to reverse it.

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.