Formerly an actor and comedian, Volodymyr Zelensky took office as president of Ukraine in May. Zelensky is Jewish, has relatives in Israel, and has visited the country several times to see family as well as to perform. In an interview with the Israeli journalist David Horovitz, he discusses some of the current controversies in Ukraine, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, regarding the darkest parts of 20th-century history. Horovitz writes:

[Zelensky] speaks at length about the Holodomor, the Soviet-imposed . . . famine of 1932–33, which killed millions, and with great respect for the victims of the Holocaust—and the need to bring a belated, honest historical account of these events into the open. He acknowledges but says less on the issue of Ukrainians’ participation in Holocaust crimes, preferring to highlight the actions of Ukraine’s righteous Gentiles, and the relative marginality of overt anti-Semitism in modern Ukraine.

[After speaking with Zelesnsky], I visited the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War—built in the Soviet era as the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. An English-language guide at the section on the Babi Yar massacre was, significantly, telling her group that while others were killed there, “only Jews were killed for being Jews.” This simple, terrible truth contrasts with the norm in the Soviet era, when the fact that the Jews were targeted by the Nazis for genocide was not acknowledged. The Soviet memorial at Babi Yar, where 33,771 Jews were marched from their homes to be shot dead in the ravine on September 29–30, 1941, commemorates atrocities carried out against the Soviet people in general.

In the interview, Zelensky explained his plans to build a new memorial at the site:

First, a memorial will be constructed for all the Jews executed at Babi Yar. This is a large project, which includes a historical museum. . . . We should also remember that more than 2,500 Ukrainians were recognized by Yad Vashem as righteous Gentiles. Many of them are no longer alive. But some of them are still with us. Many of those people saved Jews, hid them, helped them to escape from the procession that went to Babi Yar. So we will definitely find a place in the memorial for them.

Zelensky also comments on the controversies surrounding streets and public spaces named after Ukrainian nationalists who participated in the mass murder of Jews:

[Since] we have so complicated a history, [we should endeavor to] build a common history. Let’s find those people whose names do not cause controversy in our present and in our future. Let’s name the monuments and streets for those people whose names do not provoke conflict. Nowadays, we have our own modern heroes—people who have made history, scientists, people in space exploration, great sportsmen, writers—who are widely respected in all parts of Ukraine. Let’s keep politics out of it.

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.