For decades after World War II, many Jews in Sarajevo who had fought the Nazis as partisans concluded their Passover seders with a vulgar parody of the Haggadah that described their wartime experiences. Ilan Ben Zion explains its origins:

Told in a blend of Ladino and Serbo-Croatian corresponding with [Hebrew and] Aramaic lines from the Passover seder, the Partisan Haggadah provides a glimpse of the brutal reality of guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. . . . . Sephardi Jews for centuries had a rich tradition of parody—typically playing off the familiar material found in the Haggadah. The Partisan Haggadah is just one piece of a larger mosaic of Ladino parodies that date back at least to 1789, and were popular among Sephardim from Suriname to Istanbul.

Before World War II, Sarajevo was 20-percent Jewish, home to eight synagogues and overwhelmingly Sephardi. The city fell to the fascist [Croatian] Ustaše regime in 1941. . . . Over the course of the war, 10,000 of the country’s 14,000 Bosnian Jews were killed.

Many Yugoslav Jews fled to the Italian-controlled sectors along the coast, where Italian authorities interned them in concentration camps, but didn’t engage in systemic mass murder. . . . Šalom “Šani” Altarac was one of the several thousand Jews who were interned at the Rab concentration camp off the coast of modern-day Croatia. With Italy’s surrender in August 1943, Altarac and 244 other young, untrained Jewish men and women formed a Jewish [partisan] battalion. . . .

Altarac became an education officer and the following spring performed a sort of stand-up routine for the Jewish partisan troops hiding in the thickly wooded mountains of the Yugoslavian hinterland. It was a parody of the familiar Passover Haggadah, sung to a traditional Sephardic tune and accompanied by guitar, and it reframed Holocaust life in the mold of an ageless story of redemption.

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.