Near the end of World War II, Czechoslovakia’s Avia Company retooled one of its factories to produce Messerschmitts for the Luftwaffe. Avia kept making fighter planes after the war ended, but, having lost access to the German-made engines, had to redesign the aircraft with different parts, creating the S-199, an awkward hybrid used by the Czech air force. In 1948, with war on the horizon, the Haganah—unable to buy arms from the U.S., Britain, or the Soviet Union—became the only other military to purchase the S-199. Robert Gandt writes:

The first band of volunteers—two Americans, one South African, seven native Israelis—arrived at the České Budějovice air base on May 11, 1948. Lou Lenart, a wiry former U.S. Marine Corps pilot, made the group’s first flight in the S-199. It was nearly his last. Lenart recalled, “The big paddle-bladed propeller produced so much left-pulling torque that the first time I tried to take off, the plane ran away from me clear off the runway, through a fence, and over a cliff.”

To the volunteer pilots, the Czech fighter seemed to have a vicious streak, like an attack dog turning on its handler. The narrow landing gear made the S-199 difficult to keep aligned during takeoff. Directional control was made even worse by the enormous torque of the propeller. . . . The volunteers had barely begun training when, on May 15, the radio in their Czech quarters broadcast the news that Israel’s war of survival had begun.

Learning that Arab planes had bombed Tel Aviv, the pilots, with hardly any training, disassembled and packed the planes and went to fight for their country, where the aircraft were reassembled at the Ekron airfield.

The existence of the Czech-built fighters was a closely held secret. The newly assembled S-199s had not been test-flown. The guns had never been fired. None of the radios worked. But if the Egyptian army was not stopped, none of these concerns would matter. . . . Lenart, who led the four-ship [mission], had never flown in Israel before. Where was Ashdod? he wondered. All the villages along the coast looked alike.

In the [nascent Israeli air force’s] first two missions, two fighter planes were lost and one severely damaged. Of the first five pilots, one was dead and another too injured to fly again. But the secret was out: Israel had an air force. To make it official, the unit was given a designation: 101 Squadron, a grand-sounding label for a ragtag outfit down to one flyable airplane and three pilots.

Still, these crucial missions slowed the initial assault on Tel Aviv and may well have forestalled a calamitous defeat. By the war’s end in January, the S-199s had shot down a total of seven enemy planes. And as Gandt points out, the “mere sight of the fighter in the early days of the war had terrified the invaders and roused the spirits of the outnumbered defenders.”

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.