The U.S. military cemetery in Manila, with 17,058 graves, is the largest burial ground for Americans who lost their lives in World War II. In a ceremony held on February 12, five of the graveyard’s thousands of crosses were replaced with Stars of David, thanks to an effort spearheaded by Rabbi Jacob J. Schacter, whose father served as a military chaplain during the war. Shashank Bengali describes the project:

Through meticulous genealogical research, Schacter and his colleagues have succeeded in changing the grave markers of eleven Jewish soldiers buried under crosses, and they believe there are hundreds more.

About 550,000 Jewish Americans fought in World War II, making up 3.4 percent of the 16 million Americans who served—roughly equal to the Jewish share of the U.S. population at the time. [But] gravestone errors were common. Middle initials, spellings, even dates of death were sometimes recorded incorrectly by military personnel tasked with gathering the bodies of more than 400,000 dead Americans.

There were added complications for Jewish burials. Some Jews who fought in Europe discarded the dog tags that included their religious affiliation—or scratched out the “H,” code for Hebrew—in case they were captured by Nazis. When a Jewish soldier perished, the Army’s efforts to communicate with relatives, many of them recent immigrants, were sometimes stymied by language barriers.

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.