Jews settled in the Alsace region of southeastern France in the 9th century CE, and the region became part of the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry. Today, Jews in Alsatian cities live under constant threat of violence and harassment from Muslim neighbors, while both the political right and left flirt with anti-Semitism. Even though Alsace lost most of its Jewish population during the Holocaust, anti-Semites have been defacing Jewish graves. Adam Nossiter writes:

The defacing in December of gravestones in the [Jewish] cemetery in Westhoffen, a sleepy village in Alsace, was not isolated. . . . Last year there were 50 similar incidents targeting Jews in Alsace. . . . Cemeteries, schools, and village walls were daubed with swastikas or obscure references to the Third Reich. In Westhoffen’s cemetery, 107 tombstones were defaced; in the one in Quatzenheim, a village to the east, 96 were.

During World War II, the mass-defacement of Jewish graves by both Nazis and local collaborators and sympathizers was commonplace throughout Europe, and Alsace was no exception:

A large bald patch amid the headstones in the Wintzenheim graveyard is testimony to the day in 1945 when the retreating Germans forced inhabitants of the village to dig up the headstones to be used as an anti-tank barrier against the advancing Americans. The barrier was never used. But the residents of Wintzenheim, where Jews had lived since the 15th century, never put the headstones back. They used them instead in their postwar garden walls, or as paving stones.

[In some towns and villages], surviving Jews who returned after 1945 found that former neighbors didn’t want to give up the apartments and furniture they had seized with the help of the Germans.

But today’s local authorities found intolerable the image of old Jewish graves in contemporary France being defaced with the Nazi symbol. So they took an unusual step [of] organizing volunteers to patrol Alsace’s 67 threatened rural Jewish cemeteries, protecting some of these neglected vestiges of a time when Jews, excluded from the city, were forced to flourish in the Alsatian countryside.

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.