Last month, Israeli researchers discovered a telegram—dated to November 1943—from the SS chief Heinrich Himmler to the former grand mufti of Jerusalem Amin Haj al-Husseini, marking the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration and their shared hope for preventing its realization. Joel Fishman explains the telegram’s significance:

[Nazi Germany’s] alliance [with Husseini and his followers and supporters throughout the Arab world] was based on mutual support for the destruction of world Jewry, which both sides openly declared to be a shared interest and the basis of their friendship. The purpose of the telegram was to reaffirm publicly the existence of this partnership and the transaction it represented. Any discussion of Husseini’s ideological collaboration must also point out his remarkable claim that Nazism and Islam have a basic affinity. Examples of such shared values are the “Führer Principle,” discipline, and obedience which, according to him, find clear expression in the Quran. . . .

One should not overlook the essential fact that this ideological collaboration was reciprocal. The Nazi elite had a special respect and great admiration for Islam. Although these views have been documented, they have not yet been placed in context. . . . Heinrich Himmler’s doctor, Felix Kersten, wrote [in his postwar biography] an entire chapter on his patient’s “enthusiasm for Islam,” a chapter excluded from the English translation. According to Kersten, “Himmler saw Islam as a masculine, soldierly religion.” . . .

Beyond the discussion of Himmler’s telegram to Husseini, the basic challenge of honest history-writing is to place on the agenda the greater problem of Husseini’s partnership with Nazi Germany. . . . In Israel, part of the elite once argued that forgetting history is necessary in order to advance the cause of peace and understanding with the Palestinian Arabs. On the merits of the issue, it is unsound to argue that there is a virtue in preserving blank spots in our national history.

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.