In the 100 years following 1885, the Jewish population of Sudan went from six families, to some 1,000 members, to complete disappearance. In an essay describing efforts to preserve Khartoum’s Jewish cemetery, Elli Fischer tells the community’s story:

When the Sudanese rebel leader Muhammad Ahmad bin ‘Abd Allah (known as the mahdi) took Khartoum and Omdurman [a large city located directly across the Nile from Khartoum] in 1885, he forcibly converted the eight Jewish families he found there to Islam.

The fall of the mahdi in 1899 to a joint Egyptian-British force, led by General Kitchener, inaugurated the period of Anglo-Egyptian rule over Sudan—a period that lasted until 1956. It was during this period that the Jewish community flourished. Six of the eight forcibly converted families returned to Judaism, forming the nucleus of the renewed community, and new economic opportunity attracted Jews from all over the Arabic-speaking world.

After World War I, the bulk of the community gravitated . . . from Omdurman to Khartoum. At its height in the 1930s and early 1940s, the Sudanese Jewish community numbered approximately a thousand souls. . . . [Its] members were primarily retailers, merchants, and senior officials in the British administration.

The community began to decline in earnest after Sudanese independence in 1956, and its dissolution was all but complete by the end of the 1960s. That said, relative to most communities in the Middle East, the Jews of the Sudan left slowly and freely, scattering mainly to Israel, the United States, England, and Switzerland.

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.