Jerusalem’s Reḥov Heleni ha-Malkah (Queen Helena Street) was named for a Byzantine Christian queen. After Israel gained its independence, a second Helena’s name graced the street. This Helena was the 1st-century-CE queen of Adiabene—a principality located in what is now Iraq—who converted to Judaism. Elaine Rose Glickman recounts some of the talmudic legends about this remarkable historical figure:

Helena became acquainted with Judaism through Jewish merchants who visited her country and—according to legend—hired a tutor in order to learn everything she could. Around the year 30 CE, she turned her back on the dominant [local] religion and—along with her younger son Izates—formally converted to Judaism. . .

[The Talmud relates that Helena, in] addition to giving money for the beautification of the Second Temple and to support the poor in the Holy Land, . . . dipped into the royal treasury to purchase grain from Egypt and dried fruits from Cyprus when famine threatened the lives of Jerusalem’s Jews. . . . Helena also donated several significant pieces of art to the Temple: a gold ornament placed over the door, whose reflection of the sun’s rays would indicate the time to recite the morning Shema prayer, a plate onto which was carved a passage from the Torah, and the golden handles that were fastened to the Temple vessels on Yom Kippur. . . .

Queen Helena also erected a magnificent palace that may have been unearthed during excavations of the City of David, as well as an ornate mausoleum where her body and those of her descendants now lie. Her burial place is known as the Tomb of the Kings, . . . because the tomb was so glorious that early excavators assumed it housed the royal dynasty of Judah.

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.