The synagogue in India’s capital city remains active, although the Jewish community there has dwindled to about 40 members. Although New Delhi, unlike Mumbai or Cochin, does not have a long history as a Jewish center, it experienced a brief golden age at midcentury, as Manoj Sharma reports:

Jews became a part of the New Delhi’s social fabric when it became India’s capital. They came to the new capital from different parts of the country to work with the central government—especially in the railways and defense. A few German and Polish Jews, who escaped the Holocaust, also settled in the city. A Jewish Welfare Association was formed in 1949; it built the synagogue in 1956.

Ever since, the Judah Hyam Synagogue has been at the center of Jewish life in the capital. The city’s Jewish families come together here during the Friday Shabbat service. During High Holidays, the synagogue is a bustling place, thanks to Israeli diplomats and other Jewish expatriates in the city. Besides, about 10,000 international travelers visit it every year.

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.