Burak Bekdil, a journalist who once wrote for a leading Turkish newspaper, recounts being harassed and hounded from his job after writing an article critical of Hamas:

[I]n the summer of 2014, . . . friends told me that my picture was on the front page of [Turkey’s] most militant Islamist newspaper, Yeni Akit—whose editors always find a seat aboard Erdogan’s private jet during his state visits abroad.

I was accused of undermining Turkey’s defense industry and promoting the Israeli weapons lobby. But my greatest sin was to argue: “The fact that there are no Israeli casualties [in the Gaza war thus far] does not mean Hamas does not want to kill; it just means Hamas, for the moment, cannot kill.” . . . [Shortly thereafter] a pro-government columnist, in [a] tweet, called me “the disgrace of humanity,” several others joined in a lynching campaign on social media. . . .

The campaign annoyed my editors and boss, but I was kept writing provided that I would not write on “explosive” subjects. . . . After a few attempts I stopped writing about the Arab-Israeli conflict [for Turkish publications]. . . . But things went from bad to worse in Turkey. . . . The increasingly difficult rules meant that my column could not contain any of the words “Jew, Israel, Israeli, Hamas, Hamas and terror, and Palestine.”

The last straw for Bekdil came in December, when he criticized President Erdogan and his editors, under direct pressure from the regime, fired him.

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.