Jews have been producing broadsides—posters with printed text—since the invention of printing in the 15th century. The Valmadonna library, one of the world’s largest collections of Jewish books, contains several hundreds of these. Sharon Liberman Mintz, Shaul Seidler-Feller, and David Wachtel, who have edited a catalogue of these broadsides, write:

The category of Judaica broadsides in particular includes an astonishing variety of texts prepared for public or semi-public display: communally promulgated regulations, rabbinic responsa, wall calendars, commercial advertisements, poems and riddles in celebration of weddings and public events, dirges, eulogies, educational charts, fundraising circulars, reports of current events, amulets, announcements, prayers both for daily recitation and for special occasions—some celebratory, others tragic—often with vernacular instructions, and so much more.

Naturally, there are also examples of non-Jewish governmental or religious officials using broadsides to communicate with or about the Jews under their authority. Accordingly, the language of Judaica broadsides is both rich and varied: while many are in Hebrew or in Jewish languages written in Hebrew characters, others are in the local vernaculars and scripts which could be easily read by both Jews and non-Jews.

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.