The 1st-century-CE Alexandrian scholar and rhetorician Apion may be known today not for his commentaries on Homer—all of which were lost—but for his slanderous writings on the Jews, as Eli Kavon writes:

Apion’s attacks on Jews presage charges of ritual murder leveled against Jews in medieval Christendom. . . . While none of his writings are extant, we know of Apion’s anti-Semitism from the great ancient Jewish historian Josephus. In Against Apion, written by Josephus decades after Apion’s death, the Jewish historian . . . defends Judaism against the attacks of Apion and his [sometime co-author] Chaeremon.

The lies leveled at Jews in their work include deriving the word “Sabbath” from an ancient Egyptian word for a disease of the groin and claiming that Jews worshiped an ass’s head in the Jerusalem Temple. The worst libel to come from Apion, however, was the accusation that Jews would kidnap a Greek child, fatten him up, [sacrifice him], and ritually consume him in Jerusalem. This charge would come back to haunt the Jews 1,000 years later, and variations persist to this day.

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.