Last month, the governor of the Turkish city of Edirne, citing the “deep hatred” he harbored toward Jews and Israel, announced that the local synagogue would be turned into a museum without exhibitions. When Turkey’s chief rabbi protested, the governor apologized, and the plan to shutter the synagogue was retracted. But the larger fact is that Edirne, which in 1923 had some 13,000 Jews, now has only two. Its Jews were driven out by persecution long before Israel was created, as Uzay Bulut writes:

In January 1923, provoked by a series of anti-Semitic pieces published in the Pasaeli newspaper in Edirne, residents of Edirne gathered in the city center and shouted, “Your turn to leave this country will come, too! Jews, get out!” After the police were barely able to prevent attacks against Jewish shops, Jews who lived in small towns . . . moved to big cities, such as Istanbul.

Later that year, in December 1923, the Jewish community of several hundred living in Corlu, in eastern Thrace, was ordered to leave the town within 48 hours. Although the decision was delayed at the request of the chief rabbi, a similar order, given to the Jews in Catalca, a district in Istanbul, was applied immediately. The reason for the anger was clear: within the Turkification campaign of the new republic, Armenians and Greeks had been eliminated, but Jews, who were successful merchants, remained.

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.