In 1492, the newly united kingdom of Castile and Aragon gave its Jews a choice between expulsion and conversion to Christianity. Some 175,000 left; others or their descendants would later return to Judaism in Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. In 2015, Spain passed a law, intended “to right a historic wrong,” offering citizenship to Sephardi Jews who could demonstrate Spanish ancestry. Soeren Kern explains how expensive layers of red tape have prevented even those Jews who want to from becoming Spanish citizens:

The legislation’s main barriers to Spanish citizenship have been obligatory exams on Spanish language and sociocultural history, the need to travel to Spain, and exorbitant fees and costs. Although prospective applicants do not need to be practicing Jews, they must prove their Sephardi background through a combination of factors, including ancestry, surnames, and spoken language (either Ladino, a Jewish language that evolved from medieval Spanish, or Haketia, a mixture of Hebrew, Spanish, and Moroccan Judeo-Arabic).

According to the law, even if applicants speak Ladino or Haketia—languages that are spoken mostly by the elderly in some parts of Latin America, Morocco, and Turkey—they are still required to pass a Spanish-language proficiency exam .. . .

In addition to the language exams, the law requires applicants to travel to Spain to have their documentation verified by a government-approved notary public before the completed application is submitted to Spain’s Ministry of Justice. . . . As of the end of 2018, only 3,843 Sephardi Jews had obtained Spanish citizenship under the law. . . . Another 5,682 applications were pending approval—with a success rate [expected] to be around 50 percent. . . . In other words, about 5,000 Sephardi Jews will have received Spanish citizenship under the 2015 law—1 percent of the 500,000 that the Spanish government said would benefit from the law, and 0.15 percent of the estimated 3.5 million Sephardi Jews in the world today.

Spain today has one of the smallest Jewish communities in the European Union. Fewer than 50,000 Jews currently live in Spain.

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.