As legend has it, the 16th-century Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent issued a royal edict (or firman) allowing Jews to pray at the Western Wall. But a record of this firman has never been located. To further complicate matters, in the early 20th century Itamar Ben-Avi—whose father, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, was responsible for the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language—wrote extensively of a later, similar firman, issued by Sultan Abdulaziz, who ruled from 1861 to 1876. This too has never surfaced in the Ottoman archives. Nadav Shragai describes the quest for these mysterious documents, and cites the best evidence available:

[T]he British-appointed International Commission of Inquiry for the Wailing Wall (1930) brought relative order out of the chaos. The committee was established after the dispute over the Western Wall and the riots of 1929 that erupted in its wake. The commission generated tens of thousands of pages of documents and protocols that are now stored in the Central Zionist Archives. . . . The three members of the committee . . . mention no fewer than five firmans that the [two] sides claimed to have existed. They do not include the earliest one from Suleiman the Magnificent, but they look into the existence and substance of others.

The firmans mentioned by the commission date from 1840, 1880, 1889, 1893, and 1911. According to the commission’s findings, none of them explicitly mentions the Western Wall, but they do state that . . . there would be no interference with the visits of Jews to pray [at] places overseen by the Chief Rabbinate. It was obvious to the commission that this included the Western Wall. The commission said it had translations of the firmans from 1840, 1889, and 1911. The authenticity of the 1840 firman, the committee writes, “cannot be doubted.” . . .

The commission even stated that the Muslim Waqf [the religious authority that still administers the Temple Mount] saw these decrees as an expression of a positive policy toward the Jews and their freedom of religion, and there was no reason to believe that the Jews who prayed at the Western Wall were cases of exceptional tolerance. Official statements of that policy, the commission said, were at least as important as the firman of 1889, [as the Waqf’s decision was officially] registered with the Shariah court.

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.