Historians customarily count ten waves of Jewish immigration (aliyot) to the land of Israel, beginning with the first in the 1880s and ending with the tenth following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Amotz Asa-El claims that we may now be witnessing the eleventh, made up of West European Jews fleeing anti-Semitism, and describes this cohort’s defining features:

The unfolding French immigration is different from all [the previous aliyot]. Unlike the German immigration of the 1930s, it is happening despite, rather than because of, the country of origin’s government and elite. . . . Yet like the German immigration, and unlike the immigrations from the Middle East, Ethiopia, and post-World War II Europe, French Jews are arriving with some capital [and include] many professionals and entrepreneurs who are ready to join the middle class and in some cases, the upper class. . . .

[In addition], unlike the so-called Russian immigration and the German one before it, the French immigrants are mostly traditional. This will have political repercussions, as they can on the whole be expected to feel more at home on the Israeli Right. Then again, before it makes a political impact, this immigration will have to number at least 100,000—a figure which for now remains distant, even if it might be reached by the end of the decade.

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.