In covering the recent murderous attacks on Jews in New Jersey and Rockland County, some journalists have connected them to tensions between close-knit Orthodox communities and their neighbors involving zoning, school boards, and the like. David French notes that such an approach often amounts to “waving away the mountain and focusing on a pebble.”

[T]o the extent that we know the attackers’ motivations, their hatreds ran very, very deep. The Monsey attacker searched [the Internet for answers to] the question “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?” One of the Jersey City attackers followed “Black Hebrew Israelite theology,” a fringe belief that, [as one writer sums it up], holds that “African Americans are the true descendants of the ancient Israelites and that Jews are essentially pretenders to the faith.”

People do not launch machete attacks over zoning disputes. They don’t open fire in kosher supermarkets because their new neighbors don’t make good salaries. There might be “simmering local conflicts” over zoning (welcome to America; there are always “simmering local conflicts” over zoning), but none of that is truly relevant to deadly violence.

No, the unpleasant truth is that when populations of new and different people (especially religious or racial minorities) move to new and different towns, they all too often encounter vicious bigots. They don’t create vicious bigots. We understand this clearly in the race context. Spend five seconds searching on the web, and you can see truly shocking video from the 1970s of racist white crowds chanting vile insults in residential neighborhoods in New York. When their new neighborhoods integrated, they encountered vicious racists. They didn’t create vicious racists.

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.