In 2019, an Israeli backpacker named Naama Issachar was arrested at the Moscow airport, en route home from India, for possession of a modest amount of marijuana. She was sentenced to over seven years in jail, but was released in January after strenuous Israeli diplomacy. But of course Vladimir Putin demanded, and received, something in return. Shay Attias writes:

After decades of argument, [Putin] finally claimed Russian ownership of the Alexander Courtyard in Jerusalem, near the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. The dispute over the courtyard began in 1917. In May 1948, the Soviet Union appointed a “Russian property-affairs commissioner” who “did everything possible to transfer this property [namely, the Alexander Courtyard] to the Soviet Union.”

Putin has dramatically upgraded the status of the Russian Orthodox Church during his tenure as national leader. In almost every major speech, he has made sure not only to mention the Church but to support its faith narratives. . . . He has regularly used the language of the Church and quoted from the Russian Bible, sometimes even using it to justify his foreign-policy steps.

Russia still enjoys a high degree of influence in formerly Soviet areas, and Putin understands that . . . Russian churches in Ukraine, Belarus, Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia can all be used to boost that influence. As Putin just showed in Jerusalem, he is fully capable of using the Church to enhance Russian prestige.

In January, . . . Putin presented the Russian Orthodox Church with a precious diamond: the Alexander Courtyard. . . . The granting of sovereignty over any part of Jerusalem to a foreign power is a significant concession for Israel. Russian cultural and military imperialism are here to stay, and Putin is eager to expand them further.

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.