Contemplating the increased hostility directed by French Muslims toward their country, and the rise of France’s anti-Muslim National Front, Ben Judah examines the fate of the Jews in a fractured republic:

Can a Jew still live safely in a banlieue [as the poor, immigrant suburbs of Paris are called]? Since 2000, when banlieue anti-Semitism began to flare up alongside the Palestinian intifada, the number of Jewish families in [the banlieue of] Aulnay-sous-Bois fell from 600 to 100, in Le Blanc-Mesnil from 300 to 100, in Clichy-Sous-Bois from 400 to 80, and in La Courneuve from 300 to 80. French Jews call this flight internal aliyah.

This is why they move: in 2014, 51 percent of reported racist incidents in France targeted Jews. On average a Jew is assaulted in France every day. And this means [anti-Semitic violence] touches most families. A recent poll found that 74 percent of Jews who wore traditional skullcaps and 20 percent who didn’t reported being attacked. . . .

[The French pollster Jérôme] Fourquet’s research shows that French Jews are moving from areas run by Communist mayors—twinned with Palestinian camps, where Palestinian war heroes hold honorary citizenship, and regular exhibitions are held on the anniversary of the “Nakba”—to areas where there are right-wing mayors, twinned with Israel. Internal aliyah—not to Israel, or English-speaking countries—is the largest movement of French Jews.

“Yet what we found in our interviews in the Jewish community,” says Fourquet, “was more and more Jews say, there is us [the Jews], them [the Muslims], and you—the ethnic French. Yet again, in our interviews with [French Jews], they talk as if they are canaries in the coalmine. This comes up a lot: [an attitude of] ‘you’ll see it when we’re gone and you’ll be left with them.’ . . . The sense of a common French destiny is vanishing in our surveys.”

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.