A native of the Egyptian city of Alexandria, Moshe Mizrahi—who died this month at the age of eighty-six—came to the land of Israel with his family just after World War II. In the 1950s, he moved to France and began writing film criticism, but did not direct his first movie, The Customer of the Off Season—about a French concentration-camp guard who takes refuge in Israel under an assumed identity—until 1970. Liel Leibovitz reflects on his career:

The film was well received, and was nominated for several prestigious awards, including the Golden Globe. A second film wasn’t as successful, and Mizrahi . . . decided it was time to go back to Israel and tell the stories he had always wanted to tell. For the most part, these stories were about women like his mother, resourceful and courageous and forced to provide for their families by themselves.

In 1972’s I Love You, Rosa, he told a story about a young widow bound by tradition to marry her late husband’s brother; because the boy is still young, however, she ends up teaching him how to become a respectful partner, and they end up forming a partnership that defies the confines of their patriarchal, religious society. The film was nominated for an Academy Award, as was Mizrahi’s follow-up, The House in Chelouche Street, based largely on the life of the director’s mother. In 1977, he finally won the award with Madame Rosa, based on the novel The Life Before Us by Romain Gary.

Israelis, however, were not impressed. Not only was Mizrahi’s Oscar-winning film French and therefore foreign, but the director’s work was out of step with the popular Israeli cinema of the time. . . . He continued to direct, but felt himself more and more at odds with the culture in both Israel and France. . . . [But his] cinematic legacy [is] very much worthy of a second look.

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.