On Wednesday, a neo-Nazi attempting to attack Jews at prayer in the German city of Halle with a gun and explosives found the entrance locked but killed two and wounded others outside. In Berlin a few days earlier, a knife-wielding Syrian refugee attempted to enter another synagogue while yelling “Allahu Akbar” and “F— Israel” before being stopped by security guards. The police released him from custody the next day. Eldad Beck comments:

Germany is once again a dangerous place for Jews. . . . Barely a week passes without violent assaults on Jews in the country. In Berlin alone, over 400 anti-Semitic attacks were reported in the first half of 2019. We can assume the actual figure is higher since not every attack is reported.

The attack in Halle is the result of the failure of German authorities; it is the result of the incomprehensible forgiveness that the country’s law enforcement chooses to show the perpetrators of attacks against Jews, which in recent years have been largely carried out by members of Arab and Muslim immigrant communities. Although the perpetrator of the Halle attack was a member of the radical right, the day-to-day physical threat to Jewish security in Germany is sacrificed at the altar of Germany’s policy of appeasement toward Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism. When they are able to attack Jews as they please, other radicals get the sense that the spilling of blood is permissible so long as the targets are Jews.

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.