The Yazidis—practitioners of an obscure monotheistic religion—came to the attention of the world last year when Islamic State (IS) began systematically murdering them. Abraham Cooper and Yitzchok Adlerstein argue that Jews must not be indifferent to the Yazidis’ plight:

[P]art of the memory of our collective experience is standing up for the helpless, rendered voiceless by evil-doers. . . .

At this moment, more than 300,000 Yazidis languish in refugee camps. While Western intervention led last summer to relief from the siege of Mt. Sinjar [in Kurdistan], where Yazidis were dying of hunger and thirst, military intervention disappeared soon after, leaving those still in the historic Yazidi areas exposed and vulnerable. The IS genocidal campaign, according the UN, went from village to village, wiping out the males and carting off the women and girls as wives, concubines, or just playthings for jihadists who treated them as trophies of war according to Sharia, often subjecting them to repeated rape and slavery. . . .

We never met any Yazidis. But isn’t that the point? The Nazis turned a blind eye to the sanctity of every human, reducing people to numbers, then ashes. As our eyes engage the first faint springtime stirrings of the earth to reassert life from nothingness, our moral vision ought to be enhanced. Should we not be able to find and protect the sacredness of humanity, even among those we have never met?

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.