Known to Ashkenazi Jews primarily from a Yiddish expression (“as cupping helps a corpse,” describing something not at all helpful), the folk-medicinal practice of cupping has recently received public attention because of its use by the Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. The treatment can be traced back to ancient Egypt and China, and archaeologists have found evidence that it was used in ancient Israel as well. Megan Sauter writes:

Vessels like [the] small, hollow, bell-shaped cup [found at Masada] were used for the medical treatment of cupping, [which involved] placing heated cups on the skin to improve blood flow. . . .

Masada [was] a desert fortress in the Judean wilderness near the Dead Sea that was occupied by Jewish rebels during the first Jewish revolt (66–73 CE). The [cupping] glass was found in the destruction layer of 73 CE—when the Romans defeated the rebellion—with several coins inside, a clever hiding spot that remained concealed for nearly two millennia until the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin uncovered it in the 1960s. [The archaeologist] Amnon Ben-Tor suggests that the rebels may have been using this therapy during their confinement in the fortress. Another scholar who studied the cupping glass, however, believes it belonged to a Roman physician and was taken as loot by the rebels, who hid it with the accompanying shekels.

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.