Having arrived in Palestine with the British Army in 1938, at age seventeen, Tom Derek Bowden—who died last week—served under the famed and eccentric British Zionist officer Orde Wingate. In 1941, he was dispatched to Vichy-ruled Syria, where he fought alongside Moshe Dayan. Despite being released from service due to injuries, Bowden insisted on rejoining the fight on the European front, where he was eventually captured and sent to Bergen-Belsen. He returned to the Land of Israel in 1948 to fight for the Jewish state’s independence, and then went back to England to take up farming. Stephen Daisley comments on this remarkable life and its “enduring lessons.”

Bowden’s first lesson is his simplest: always be for the Jews. When the world asks you to choose between the Jews and their enemies, or insists on your neutrality in the matter, never hesitate to choose the Jews. Your philo-Semitism will be in the minority most of the time and some Jews will regard it with suspicion, but it is a moral imperative nonetheless. The preservation of Jewish life, community, and peoplehood is a civilizational commandment. No society can be advanced whose Jews aren’t free, equal, and safe.

Another lesson from Bowden’s life is that being for the Jews often requires courage. Few are called on to show the measure of valor Bowden did and he is a useful reminder that, whatever sufferings come with philo-Semitism and Zionism, your inconveniences are minor compared to his. Bowden teaches us, too, that there is no conditional solidarity with Jews. He is no friend who is only there when it’s easy or politically palatable. Zionism and Jewish peoplehood are inextricably linked, and Bowden understood that if the modern Jewish state was strangled at birth it would indeed mean another “annihilation” of the Jews. Bowden fought for Israel for the same reason anti-Semites fight against it: Israel is the home of Jewish strength and Jewish security.

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.