Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who arrived in Palestine in 1881 and there almost single-handedly revived Hebrew as a spoken language, was born and spent much of his early life in what is today Belarus. Recently the country commemorated his achievement with a monument and a boisterous public ceremony complete with dancing and musical performances.

I asked Boris Gersten, the chairman of the Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Organizations and Communities, why locals seem to find Ben-Yehuda’s legacy so important. “We don’t get a lot of international interaction,” he said of his country, which is sometimes called Europe’s last dictatorship and is subject to sanctions by the European Union for alleged human-rights abuses by its all-powerful president, Alexander Lukashenko. “So whenever there is some point of interaction with people from abroad, it is interesting, attractive,” he said.

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.