As a whole, France was more eager than other European nations to hand over its Jews to the Nazis. Nonetheless, over 300,000 French Jews managed to survive World War II, mostly due to the heroic and often religiously-motivated actions of those willing to hide them. A new book retells the story of Chambon-sur-Lingon, a small mountain village whose residents went to extraordinary lengths to save Jews. Stefan Kanfer writes:

The [villagers] were led by an upright, zealous pastor, André Trocmé, whose moral stance was informed by the Old Testament, “with its many references to the rescue of the oppressed, the sharing of bread with the hungry, the taking in of the homeless into one’s house.” Accordingly, his followers mixed Jewish children among their own, supplying safe new surnames, furnishing Jewish adults with forged identity cards and guiding them to neutral Switzerland. Freedom was not free; the Gestapo raids netted some villagers, who were beaten and murdered. A local doctor who dared to express his disdain for the occupying army was shot. A young woman who had saved dozens of children was finally arrested and sent to Drancy. There she tried to comfort three orphaned Jews. All four were deported to Auschwitz. The little ones were sentenced to death. The young woman was not. But she refused to be separated from her charges and accompanied them to the gas chamber.

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.