Last week, some 100 demonstrators gathered in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, waving placards bearing anti-Semitic slogans and expressing their opposition to the Ukrainian government. Vladislav Davidzon argues that there was more to this protest than meets the eye:

The incident is the latest attempt to weaponize accusations of anti-Semitism in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Proving that the government in Kiev and the population of western Ukraine is infested with neo-Nazis has since the very beginning of the conflict been the core strategy of the propaganda coming out of Russian media organs. . . . This rhetoric directly echoes the Soviet Union’s labeling of any actor that opposed its geopolitical interests as “counterrevolutionary.” [The goal is to] delegitimize Ukraine by . . . fatally associating it with fascism. . . .

Ukrainian media reported that members of the demonstration had been seen (and filmed) collecting 50- and 100-Hryvnia bills for their participation. . . . When the assembled journalists demanded that the protesters explain their demands, some barked out feeble and enraged generalities. Other protesters could be seen hiding their faces behind their hands in front of the camera and behind the banners in shame. Some . . . had the tell-tale pink and puffy faces of chronic alcoholics, which might suggest that political activism was not their primary concern.

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.