In 1944, Rudolf Kastner, a prominent Hungarian Zionist, bribed the Nazis into allowing 1,686 Jews safe passage to Switzerland. After the war, he came under fierce criticism from survivors for cooperating with the Nazis and failing to warn the rest of Hungarian Jewry of the fate that awaited them at Auschwitz. A libel suit launched against one of his detractors led to one of the first major discussions of the Holocaust in Israel’s public sphere. In 1957, Kastner was assassinated. Recalling his motivations at the time, his now-elderly assailant expresses regret for what he did:

Today, at eighty-one, and with the publication of his book, Quilt Blanket, Ze’ev Eckstein takes stock of his life for the last time and says: “I wouldn’t do it today. I wouldn’t shoot. There’s no doubt about it. . . . In what way did I pay a price? I murdered someone. I did something that takes me back to the entire Bible, back to Cain and Abel.”

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.