In Ukraine’s recent election, Volodomyr Zelensky—a Jewish actor and comedian who made his name playing a hapless everyman unexpectedly elected to the presidency—was elected to the presidency by a landslide. Vladislav Davidzon, one of the few journalists granted extended access to Zelensky, describes the factors that contributed to his success, and considers what it might mean for the country’s Jews:

As has been widely and gleefully repeated by Ukrainian patriots, Zelensky’s election paves the way for Ukraine to be the only state other than Israel to have a Jewish president and a Jewish prime minister (Volodymyr Groysman) serving concurrently. If nothing else, Sunday’s electoral results should finally shatter the five-year-long Kremlin narrative of Kiev having been captured by a neo-Nazi fascist junta, [a charge Russia has used to smear efforts to fight back against its invasion of Ukraine]. Still, in private, multiple leaders of the Ukrainian Jewish community expressed worry to me about that situation not being an appealing one for the Jewish community in the long term if Zelensky fails as a political leader.

[For his part], Zelensky forcefully defended the history and contributions of Ukrainian Jews to the country [in a conversation on the day] before the first round of voting. . . .

Ukraine’s new president is the son of a Jewish intelligentsia family from Krivyi Rih, a gritty industrial city in the country’s Russian-speaking south. The symbolic location of his birthplace has served to reassure some voters that he would respect a truce between mutually hostile Russian-leaning and Ukrainian-nationalist visions of the country’s cultural future.

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.