Reflecting on two years of study of the French Jewish community, Yossi Shain and Sarah Fainberg note the increasing role that Israel plays in French Jews’ sense of themselves:

French aliyah to Israel has quadrupled since [Ilan] Halimi was murdered [in 2006], and between 9,000 and 10,000 French olim are expected in 2015, making France the leading country of emigration to Israel, one which will lose a full 2 percent of its Jewish population (the world’s largest after Israel and the United States) this year alone. Moreover, many well-to-do French Jews who have not made a final exit are part of the “Boeing aliyah,” owning a residence in Tel Aviv or Netanya while continuing to work in Paris or Nice. The “push factor” is driven of course by fear of Islamic extremism but also by the ongoing pessimism of young French citizens about the declining grandeur de la France. . . .

Of course, anti-Semitism [itself] has long been “Israelized,” and not just in France; the justification of anti-Jewish hatred and violence by reference to Israel’s policies is, by now, an old story. But the implications of the increasing importance of Israeli culture for Diaspora Jews have yet to be fully understood, and nowhere is this more true than in France. French Jews follow Israeli media, watch Israeli films, read Israeli literature, conform to Israeli religious patterns, and eat Israeli cuisine. Indeed, according to the sociologist Erik Cohen, when given the hypothetical choice, many French Jews would prefer to “be reborn as Jews in Israel.”

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.