Six months ago, the Israel Antiquities Authority authorized the purchase of 100 documents from what was originally, and misleadingly, termed the “Afghan Genizah.” Twenty-nine manuscripts from the same collection, obtained three years ago, are currently in the custody of Israel’s national library. Nir Hasson writes (free registration required):

Scholars now know that the source of the manuscripts is not a genizah—[a place for storing discarded manuscripts] like the one found in Cairo—but rather the archive of a Jewish family of traders who lived on the Silk Road in Afghanistan in the 11th century. The head of the family is named in the manuscripts as Abu Nassar ben Daniel, and the family apparently lived in the central-Afghan city of Bamyan. (The city made headlines eleven years ago when the Taliban blew up two huge statues of Buddha there.) The collection of manuscripts came to light a few years later, after the fall of the Taliban. Rumor has it that the collection was found in a cave or deep rock crevice somewhere in Afghanistan, where it had been secreted by its owners about 1,000 ago.

The manuscripts were written in a wide variety of languages—Aramaic, Hebrew, Persian, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian; the last two languages are, respectively, Arabic and Persian written in Hebrew letters. Legal and commercial manuscripts can be found in the collection along with sacred writings and personal letters.

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.