On her first day at a public magnet high school with a focus on marine biology, Paige (her last name has been kept private) experienced bigotry for the first time in her life, as Sharon Otterman reports:

[Paige] came home in tears because two teachers had laughed when pronouncing a student’s last name, Guiffre, as “Jew-Frey.” “I wouldn’t want a last name like that,” she recalled one teacher saying. The same teacher would later recommend Mein Kampf to her class as a great book. Late that school year, Paige’s mother complained about some of the incidents to the school district, including that one student had identified himself on social media as a member of the Hitler Youth. Nothing seemed to change.

This sort of thing became commonplace over the next two years, but the following incident nonetheless stood out:

The letters stretch over 30 feet, written into the sand on a beach in New Jersey. The teenager in the photo rests casually on his side above the words, smiling, his head propped up in his hand. “I h8 Jews,” the words read. The anti-Semitic picture, taken on a junior class trip and texted to a group of classmates at a high school on the Jersey Shore in 2018, was portrayed to the group as an edgy joke.

“Yearbook cover,” the boy in the picture texted. “Oh yea,” responded one girl, active in the yearbook club, adding that she had already submitted the photo to the faculty adviser. “It’s gonna be great.”

Paige, who was among the many students receiving the picture, complained to her parents, who then brought up the incident with the principal, who took some limited disciplinary action. After that, the harassment grew worse: Paige was not just Jewish but a “snitch.” When her parents went to the principal again, he “recommended she worry less about friends at school and find friends in her synagogue.” Unsurprisingly, perhaps, other parents rallied around the offending students, who insisted that they weren’t anti-Semites at all—just teenagers with a healthy sense of humor.

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.