While it has become a mainstay of Muslim anti-Israel propaganda to deny the historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and the very existence of the two Temples there, an obscure Arabic inscription serves as a reminder that it was not always thus, as Ilan Ben Zion writes:

The previously overlooked dedicatory inscription from the mosque of Umar in Nuba, a village some sixteen miles southwest of Jerusalem, mentions the village as an endowment for the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque. But what’s striking is that the Dome of the Rock is referred to in the text as “the rock of the Bayt al-Maqdis”—literally, “the Holy Temple”—a verbatim translation of the Hebrew term for the Jerusalem Temple that early Muslims employed to refer to Jerusalem as a whole and to the gold-domed shrine in particular. . . .

Israeli researchers, who presented their findings during a conference on Jerusalem archaeology last week, dated it to the 9th or 10th centuries CE, based on the Arabic writing’s orthography and formulation comparable to dedicatory inscriptions from mosques in Ramleh and Bani Naim. . . .

Further, medieval Muslim traditions surrounding the Dome of the Rock cited by the authors “identified the mount again and again with King David and with King Solomon’s Temple” and “understood the mount to be the ancient Temple rebuilt, the Quran the true faith, and the Muslims the true children of Israel.”

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.