Recalling the family seders of her childhood, Daniella Greenbaum recounts the story her grandmother would tell, year after year, about a Passover not easily forgotten:

In March of 1945, in Bergen-Belsen, [my grandmother] Masha, her sister Shoshana, their mother Yehudit, and several others sat down to conduct a seder—of sorts. Without food, wine, prayer books, or even a table, they did their best to remember the liturgy and engage in some sort of ritual normalcy.

Somehow they spoke of the bread of affliction that their ancestors ate, despite the fact that they too were afflicted and had no bread to eat. Somehow they proclaimed, “Let all who are hungry come and eat,” despite their own hunger and lack of food. Somehow they spoke of how Pharaoh embittered the lives of his Jewish slaves, though they too were Jewish slaves whose lives had been impossibly embittered. . . .

One day, they prayed, they would be able to sing of slavery in the past tense, and retell, as Jews are commanded to do, the story of the exodus. For the millions that perished at the hands of the Nazis, including Masha’s father, this dream would never become reality.

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.