On September 5, 1972, during the Munich Olympics, a Palestinian group connected to Yasir Arafat’s PLO took hostage eleven members of the Israeli team—murdering two of them immediately and the rest during a botched West German rescue operation. In response, then-Prime Minister Golda Meir gave the Mossad the go-ahead to hunt down and eliminate the terrorists responsible for the attack, in what would become one of the agency’s most storied operations. The PLO subsequently ceased engaging in terrorism in Europe. Speaking first with Golda Meir’s foremost biographer Francine Klagsbrun and then with the Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, David Makovsky delves into the massacre’s significance, and that of the Jewish state’s response. (Audio 34 minutes.)

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.