In the chaos following the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, a group of Ukrainian nationalist guerrillas calling themselves the Poliska Sich seized control of a small area surrounding the town of Olevsk. Their goal was to resist the Soviets, a goal often pursued by carrying out brutal pogroms against Jews. Later, the guerrillas helped the Nazis in implementing the final solution. Now their leader, Taras Bulba-Borovets, is being honored by both local authorities and the national government, eager for a past of patriotic Ukrainian resistance against Russian rule. Jared McBride writes:

Bulba-Borovets ruled [the town of] Olevsk and its environs during the early months of the German-Soviet war, while Germans were thin on the ground in this remote location. It was only after the pogrom violence and further abuse of Jews at the hands of the Poliska Sich that the Germans took over Olevsk in September 1941 and established a ghetto. The Sich then patrolled the ghetto and later provided the Germans with manpower to liquidate the Jewish population. . . .

The memory of Bulba-Borovets and his Sich has figured prominently in Olevsk and regional politics over the past five years. In the [nearby] city of Rivne there are plans to build a new monument for Bulba-Borovets—not to mention this summer’s bike race named after the Sich. Olevsk itself has more plans, including: naming a park after the [short-lived self-styled] “Olevsk Republic” or Bulba-Borovets [himself], naming a square after Bulba-Borovets, and creating an exposition about the Sich in a local museum (with plans to build a separate museum in the future). . . . Moreover, the Sich force has caught the interest of the Ukrainian parliament. . . . This past April it passed a resolution to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of Poliska Sich.

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.