Unlike most countries in the Middle East, Jordan has diplomatic relations with Israel and allows Israeli citizens to enter its borders. Jordanian law, however, prohibits Jews from becoming citizens or owning property. A handful of Jewish students and aid workers do currently live there, but they keep their Jewishness secret. Avi Lewis writes about their lives:

Jordanian society has a peculiar attitude when it comes to Jews. Walking through Amman, one can find copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, translated into Arabic and proudly adorning the windows of bookstores and street newspaper vendors. . . .

Moshe Silverman [a pseudonym] . . . encountered overt anti-Semitism—not directed at him specifically but as a general antipathy to Jews that engendered a sort of camaraderie among people as it unified them in acrimony toward Jews. . . .

Silverman related a conversation he took part in at the local gym, which he visited regularly. He and the gym owner had become quite close, trading jokes and spotting one another at the lifting station. “One day I asked him what would happen if he saw that a Jew had joined his gym . . . ,” Silverman told me.

“He responded that, ‘if I meet a Jew in the gym, I will drag him out into the street and beat him to a pulp’—and he said it in such a friendly way, as if this was a perfectly normal thing to say.”

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.