In 1973, when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on the Jewish state, there was reason to fear that Arab success on the battlefield might encourage an Arab revolt within Israel. Nothing of the sort took place, writes Abraham Rabinovich. Instead Arab Israelis rallied around the flag:

Israel’s Arabs . . . volunteered to replace mobilized Jewish reservists, worked on kibbutz farms, signed up for civil-defense work, gave blood, and bought government bonds to help finance the [state during this national] emergency. . . .

The government initially refrained from involving the Arab population in efforts to stabilize the home front. “But after a few days,” said [the then-prime minister’s adviser on Arab affairs, Shmuel] Toledano, “we saw that they were offended by this attitude.” Offices were opened in seven Arab communities to register volunteers. The bonds sold to thousands in the Arab sector had the word “war” deleted from the “war bond certificates” they received. This way, Arab Israelis could express support for the state without overtly supporting a war against Arab states.

Rabinovich saw this with his own eyes, when, working as a reporter, he made a visit to the Arab town of Nazareth:

Climbing the Galilee hills, I came upon a roundabout that lay between Arab Nazareth and the Jewish town of Nazareth Illit, which had been founded in the 1950s as a sentinel overlooking the Arab city. The border of the traffic circle was lined with tables bearing soft drinks, sandwiches, and cakes. Several military vehicles had stopped and soldiers emerged for hurried snacks. In villages and towns throughout the country local women had set up similar roadside refreshment points for soldiers heading for the fronts. But there was something different about this one. All the women at the tables catering to the soldiers were Arab.

[The village’s mayor], Seif e-Din Zouabi . . . held a rally in the Arab city “to express support for the state.” Six hundred residents turned up. The rally was clearly expedient politically in the charged circumstances—Israel was at war with Arab states and the authorities were closely watching the reaction of Arab Israelis. But Zouabi offered an insight that sounded more like empathy than expedience. “Arab Israelis appreciate that the Jews have sent their children to war,” he said, “while we sit home at night and count our children.”

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.