Earlier this month, Rabbi Gershom Sizomu, one of the leaders of the Abayudaya—as Uganda’s indigenous Jews are called—was sworn into his country’s parliament. Tommy Trenchard and Aurelie Marrier D’Unienville report:

The Abayudaya, which means “people of Judah” in the local Luganda language, live in a handful of eastern Ugandan villages, and they could do with some political leverage. There are fewer than 2,000 members; they make up less than 0.006 percent of Uganda’s predominantly Christian population and only 3 percent of [their region’s] Muslim-dominated population.

Sizomu’s brother, Kintu Moses Aron, [believes] Sizomu’s new position will help the community obtain the same legal rights as Christians and Muslims, including getting the government to recognize Jewish holidays so the Abayudaya can observe their traditions [more easily]. Community members also hope that Sizomu’s election will help them obtain funding for Jewish educational services and places of worship.

The Abayudaya, originally followers of a tribal leader who came to Judaism through Christianity in the early 20th century, suffered intense persecution during the reign of Idi Amin in the 1970s. More recently, they converted to Judaism under the auspices of the Conservative movement; a small group is now seeking Orthodox conversion. Last year they were formally recognized as a Jewish community by the Jewish Agency.

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.