Last week, Sweden’s prime minister announced a conference on anti-Semitism to take place in October 2020 and to be attended by European heads of state. It will be held in the southern Swedish city of Malmo, the location of numerous anti-Semitic incidents in the past few years, some of which were violent—the most recent involving a youth group affiliated with the prime minister’s own party. Ben Cohen notes that the conference, despite its apparent good intentions, poses several dangers:

[T]he first potential danger [is] that the conference will allow Malmo to clean up its image as a center of anti-Semitism without cleaning up its act. The degree to which a conference on anti-Semitism hosted by a left-wing government in Europe would be willing to address the elephant in the room—the anti-Semitism that doesn’t come from the far right—is as yet unclear . . .

First, there is the need to recognize that anti-Semitism is politically promiscuous and can be found with equal venom on the left and the right. . . . Second, government efforts against anti-Semitism have rightly pushed a broader message of tolerance and openness. . . . But [these efforts] also require . . . recognition that anti-Semitism is a problem not just of the ethnic majority but of minorities as well, and particularly Europe’s multiple Muslim communities.

At the present time, if a swastika is daubed on a Jewish building in Germany and the perpetrator remains unidentified, the police will categorize the crime as “far right,” despite having seen the profusion of signs equating the Star of David with the swastika at numerous left-wing, anti-Zionist demonstrations. That perhaps exemplifies why a wholesale transformation of how anti-Semitism is understood by law-enforcement officials, teachers, and social workers is necessary.

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.