The oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible is the Leningrad codex, written by an Egyptian Jewish scribe in 1008 CE. (The Aleppo codex, written around 930, is missing nearly 200 pages.) Older still are the Dead Sea Scrolls, which include extensive fragments of the Bible and date to before 68 CE. Only one manuscript of the Bible exists from the intervening period, and Jennifer Drummond tells its story:

The Ashkar-Gilson manuscript was purchased by Fuad Ashkar and Albert Gilson (hence its name) from an antiquities dealer in Beirut in 1972, and some years later they donated it to Duke University in North Carolina. Based on carbon-14 dating and paleographic analysis, the Ashkar-Gilson manuscript was dated to sometime between the 7th and 8th centuries CE, right at the tail end of the so-called “silent era”—an almost 600-year period from the 3rd through the 8th centuries, or the time between the oldest Hebrew Bible fragments (the Dead Sea Scrolls) and the oldest complete authoritative Masoretic codices.

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.