The city of Chania, in northwestern Crete, was home to a small but venerable Jewish community prior to World War II. In 1944, its Jews were put on a boat with their ultimate destination being Auschwitz. A British submarine torpedoed the boat, killing them all. In 1999, Chania’s Etz Hayyim synagogue was rededicated under the auspices of Nicholas Stavroulakis, who has dedicated much of his life to preserving the remnants of Greek Jewry. As Liam Hoare writes, however, the synagogue still lacks a congregation:

Jewish life in Crete . . . predated the destruction of the Second Temple, the creation of the European Diaspora, and the birth of rabbinic and talmudic Judaism. Cretan Judaism and Greek Judaism more broadly developed its own Hellenistic character not only separate from the land of Israel but also from what would become Ashkenaz and Sepharad. . . . In Chania, for example, on Yom Kippur the book of Job was read in the synagogue not in Hebrew but in Greek—a tradition that Stavroulakis has resurrected. . . .

[S]ome of the people who use Etz Hayyim are not Jewish. For example, there are Christian residents of Chania who come from time to time on Shabbat or the high holidays. . . . Of those who use Etz Hayyim that are Jewish, [says Stavroulakis,] “Some of them are Jews who are of ambiguous backgrounds. They’re not Cretan Jews—they are from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, [or are] of mixed North African background; they come to synagogue and are firm supporters. There are [also] Ashkenazim who don’t admit their Judaism anywhere and are able to come to terms with it through the synagogue.”

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.