Last month, an off-duty police officer in a suburb of Haifa shot an unarmed teenager of Ethiopian-Jewish parentage. While the preliminary reports from the police investigation support the officer’s claim that he fired at the ground while trying to break up a fight in which the teenager, Solomon Tekah, was involved, the shooting has already provoked mass demonstrations, some of them violent, that have in turn prompted comparisons between this shooting and those in the U.S. that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement. Shmuel Rosner argues that the parallels, noted by both the American press and some of the Israeli protesters themselves, are fewer than one might think:

[First, take the] two very different histories of two black communities. Africans were shipped to America as slaves. Ethiopian Israelis were brought by their own country to play their part in the great Zionist saga of gathering Israel’s tribes. Moreover, African Americans had to fight for equality. Ethiopian equality, at least the principle of it, was a given. And yes, mistakes were made. And yes, there are clearly some issues that are not yet resolved. And yet, Israel invested more resources in helping the newcomers than it did for any other community.

Alas, what [the protestors] see is not yesterday’s achievements. What they see is today’s failures. The community, on average, is still poor. It still has a high rate of crime, suicide, and domestic violence. . . . The majority of Israeli Jews want Ethiopian Jews to integrate and succeed. The majority of Israeli Jews say that Ethiopian Jews contribute to the prosperity and well-being of the country. But it’s hard to deny that there is a problem connected to the fact that Ethiopians are easily identified because of their skin color.

The media were sympathetic to the unrest. The government will be quick to respond, by throwing more money at the situation and looking more seriously into making improvements that have the potential to tame the anger. . . . The most worrying aspect of the violent protests that we’ve seen in recent days is the prospect of the Ethiopian integration issue being Americanized. That is, of its becoming not a short-term difficulty in need of a quick and efficient response, but rather a long-term problem, maybe permanent, with all the associated baggage of cultural fissures, intrinsic anger and fear, and a great sense of alienation.

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.