On June 4, 1988, Poland held its first free elections since before World War II, and Solidarity, the anti-Communist party, won 99 percent of the vote. To Sever Plocker, the date marks the beginning of the end of Communism and therefore of the cold war in Europe. He takes the recent anniversary of the election to reflect on the implications for the Jewish state:

Israel gained a great deal from the collapse of the Soviet empire. Post-Communist governments initiated full diplomatic relations with the Jewish state, followed by economic and strategic ties. The arms race to keep up with Soviet armaments, [which flowed freely into the hands of Israel’s enemies], also ended.

In a casual conversation in 1988, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told the American Jewish oil tycoon Armand Hammer that he would “allow all Jews who want to emigrate to Israel to do so,” and the report [of the conversation] was published as a scoop in [the Israeli paper] Yediot Aḥronot. The more than one million immigrants who have arrived in Israel since then have enabled, among other things, the flourishing of Israeli high-tech, which brought the country at least $450 billion in revenue. Were it not for the sweeping victory of the anti-Communist revolution of 1989, Israel would not be what it is today. It is worth remembering this.

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.