Reflecting on the ever-intensifying atmosphere of fear in which French Jews live, Elena Servettaz revisits the incident that wakened her to the problem:

I remember very clearly the first time I felt this fear, several years ago. It happened quite suddenly. I was shopping in the Galeries Lafayette department store. The vendor, a young Arab man, was very helpful and cheerful. I was trying on clothes while he was taking care of his other customers. At the time, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front was rising in the polls, and he asked me what I thought about Le Pen.

“What do you want me to think about Le Pen?” I asked him, laughing. “I would sooner forget she exists.” The young man seemed to want to test me more: “She is the devil, but many Catholics in France admire her. Don’t you? You are Catholic and you don’t like her?” I was very surprised that discussion in a luxury shop turned so personal, but answered by trying to make another joke: “Who told you I was Catholic?”

But the conversation stopped the very same minute. “Jewish!” he hissed and recoiled from me as if I were a leper. He went away and he asked his colleague to help me instead. Le Pen was no more a devil for him, but I was.

Should I have reacted that day, and how could I do that? It’s very bizarre that in Judaism so much is about transmission, but there’s something else that most Jewish families pass on with their traditions, knowledge, and philosophy—it is this bizarre behavior of preferring to accept aggression rather than fight it.

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.