Beginning in 1971, the Soviet police repeatedly arrested Yosef Begun for his involvement in teaching Hebrew, his connections with other Jewish dissidents, and his application to emigrate to Israel. Thanks to American pressure, he was released from his final imprisonment at the beginning of 1988 and since then has lived in Israel. In an interview with David Samuels, he tells how he was first drawn to the underground Jewish revival in the USSR, a process that began when he met an older man who offered to teach him Hebrew:

[H]e asked me, would you like to learn Hebrew? Hebrew—I asked him—what is “Hebrew”? He said to me it is the language of the Bible. I asked him, “What is the Bible?” He told me. Then he explained that Hebrew is the language of the state of Israel. . . . He had been a student at the Volozhin yeshiva before the Russian Revolution. He lived in a small, inexpensive flat, but he was a very educated man. He told me that he had met [the Zionist leader Vladimir] Jabotinsky.

Nobody knew [about the Hebrew lessons]. I studied with him in a very secret way.

Sometime after Begun enrolled in his clandestine Hebrew tutorials, he befriended a Jewish coworker; the two would often ride home on the bus together:

[W]e would talk about many different things, but not about Jewish subjects. . . . Talking about Jewish subjects was [taboo], and even dangerous. I was afraid, and everyone was afraid, to talk about such subjects.

[H]is hobby was Esperanto. . . . And he was very often invited to join a group he belonged to of people who were interested in Esperanto. . . . And every time I would say, “You know, I am very busy.” But [once] he saw in my pocket a small Hebrew textbook that my teacher gave me. . . . Then [my friend] began to talk with me in Hebrew. And of course it happened that his Esperanto group was actually a Zionist group.

So of course I came with him to his group of Esperanto Zionists. And from this moment I became a Zionist, and I met people who lived by their hope to go to Israel.

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.