In the past week, the Jewish state’s baseball team has won four consecutive victories in the World Baseball Classic (WBC), even scoring an upset against Cuba’s highly ranked team on Saturday night. Lee Smith comments on the excitement the team has generated:

[E]ven people who aren’t normally baseball fans are pulling for Israel. Even before the U.S. team took to the field (the Americans opened Friday night against Colombia), the Israeli squad had generated an unusually high level of interest in the WBC [which is] held every four years. . . . [F]or most casual fans, the WBC is essentially a string of exhibition games [as opposed to a major event]. . . . It’s different for fanatics with immigrant backgrounds from the Caribbean baseball powers, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the 2013 WBC champion Dominican Republic. Here some of the Dominican players celebrate “plátano pride,” and the Baltimore Orioles star Manny Machado explains why he’s playing for the Dominican Republic rather than the United States. . . .

I suspect there’s something similar going on with the Israeli club. American Jews are thrilled to see Jewish ballplayers take their place among the nations of baseball. Most of the Israel roster is made up of American ballplayers whose family history qualifies them for Israeli citizenship, but only two active players are Israelis. . . .

The first-base coach Nate Fish is also an Israeli citizen, having made aliyah in 2013. I spoke . . . with him as he and the club prepared for their game with Cuba. Fish . . . told me that “it’s the golden age of Jewish baseball. There were always good Jewish players in the past, but it was spread out. So you have Sandy Koufax and other [Jewish star athletes of previous generations]. But now you have numbers.”

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.