As comparing refugee crises has become more common, so has equating those who today are cautious about allowing large numbers of Syrian refugees into their countries with those who refused entry to Jewish refugees in the late 1930s. James Kirchick objects:

Syrian refugees pouring into Europe are not fleeing imminent death. They are leaving refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey that, though hardly ideal, are not Auschwitz. In 1939, moreover, there was no Israel to protect the hunted Jews of Europe, whereas today more than a handful of ostentatiously rich Arab Muslim countries have barely lifted a finger to alleviate the plight of their brethren.

As to the deeper question of assimilation, while there were no legitimate concerns as to whether Jewish refugees from Europe shared the liberal democratic values of American society, or as to whether they might become susceptible to radicalization by a global terrorist movement, the same can hardly be said about today’s Syrians (this observation applies more to Europe than it does America, which does a far better job assimilating immigrants, Muslims or not). . . .

Invoking the American nativism of the 1930s to win points in the current debate over Syrian refugees is ironic, moreover, because going by that analogy it’s not just xenophobic conservatives who are guilty of reviving the chauvinist spirits of America First but isolationist progressives as well. Led by the president of the United States, they have counseled a hands-off policy toward Bashar al-Assad, whose depredations in Syria have led to 300,000 dead and half the country’s population displaced. Would not those who truly learned the [supposed] universal lesson of the Holocaust, “never again,” have done everything in their power to put an end to the source of the refugee crisis, that is, the murderous barbarism of the Assad regime, just as the victorious Allies destroyed Nazi Germany, tormentor of the Jews and the enemy of human civilization itself?

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.