In an interview on Saturday, Felix Klein, Germany’s “commissioner for Jewish life and the fight against anti-Semitism,” stated that he “cannot advise Jews to wear the kippah everywhere or at all times in Germany” in light of the frequency of anti-Semitic attacks. German public figures, led by the popular newsmagazine Bild, have loudly criticized Klein and encouraged German Gentiles to wear kippot in solidarity. Defending Klein, Andrew Mark Bennett contends that he was not encouraging cowardice but simply stating the facts. Bennett has less patience for the wave of sympathizers:

“The kippah belongs to Germany,” declared Bild’s editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt. It’s a nice sentiment, but do the facts support such a claim? And what about the human being wearing the kippah? Does he belong to Germany, too? Even if he does not belong, what about the duty of the state to ensure his religious freedom and personal security? . . . Bild offered a cut-out kippah for Germans to wear in solidarity with Jews. The handful who don the cartoonish paper kippah can congratulate themselves for supporting Jewish life in Germany—without ever bothering to engage with an actual kippah-wearing Jew. This kippah-without-a-Jew is stripped of its traditional (and gendered) significance into a prop for asserting tolerant liberalism.

I do not need or want anyone to rebuke Klein. I want Germany to recognize, exactly as Klein has done, that the average kippah-wearing Jew has hidden his kippah under a hat in Germany for years. . . .

Today, various “neutrality” laws in Germany prohibit state employees in schools and in courts from wearing a kippah in the performance of their public-facing duties. The push for such provisions, buoyed by judicial approval, is only growing. The imagined need for “strengthening religious and ideological neutrality” is apparently of vastly greater importance than a Jew’s religious freedom. Furthermore, these laws tell us plainly that our kippah is not neutral, [but rather] alien to German law and education. . . .

This state intolerance of the kippah is not unconnected from the anti-kippah threats in the streets.

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.