Having come to Canada in 2017 from war-torn Syria, Aboud Dandachi has enjoyed not just physical safety but newfound freedoms—including the freedom to interact with Israelis. He was thus eager to attend a talk at York University by a group of IDF reservists. There he encountered a rude surprise:

Shortly before the event started, a large group of people waving Palestinian flags and shouting anti-Israel, pro-intifada slogans through speakerphones made its way up to the floor where the event was to be held. During the event, they proceeded to bang on the doors to the auditorium and to use the speakerphones to drown out the event being held inside. Several times, the event was interrupted by hateful, angry individuals who had come in with every intention of being as disruptive and disrespectful as possible. Outside, their friends made sure to cover every exit from the auditorium and blare their slogans non-stop.

I was astonished at the number of police officers and private security guards that were required to keep the angry crowd outside away from those inside the auditorium. Bashar al-Assad, when he triumphantly drove into the formerly rebel-held Damascus neighborhood of Ghouta, hadn’t required such a large security detail.

One [attendee] compared the happenings of that night with her experience under the KGB in the Soviet Union. The KGB, like the Syrian secret police, were thugs dedicated to imposing and policing an orthodoxy of thought. No dissenting opinion to be tolerated. Just as the angry crowd outside were not about to tolerate any opposing opinion.

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.