In 2003, the American military came upon an enormous cache of Jewish historical documents in the headquarters of the Saddam Hussein-era security service. After securing permission from the new Iraqi government, the U.S. moved the archive to Washington, DC for restoration and preservation—on the condition that it would later be restored to Iraq. Preservation and digitization are now complete, but Edy Cohen argues that it would be wrong to let the document go back:

This decision is both absurd and pathetic, like giving a thief back what he stole. . . . Why should the U.S. return the collection to a place that is no longer home to Jews? Returning the archive to the Iraqis is like returning the belongings of European Jews to the Nazis; it’s stolen Jewish property.

Even though the Jews of Iraq lived in Babylon before the advent of Islam and before the Prophet Muhammad came along, there are no Jews there today. More than 150,000 Iraqi Jews left the country over the course of the 20th century, some motivated by Zionism, and others by fear for their lives. Iraq didn’t know how to protect its Jews, and as early as 1941, hundreds of Iraqis were slaughtering Jews in a massive pogrom known as the Farhud.

When Israel was founded in 1948, and hatred toward Jews continued to mount, the Iraqi government permanently revoked the citizenship of Jews and expelled them from the country, freezing their bank accounts and confiscating their property, which today is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. . . .

Iraq is now well on its way to being a failed [state]. . . . Therefore, it is upon the Israeli government to pressure the Trump administration to ensure that the archive of Iraqi Jewry isn’t returned to Iraq. It isn’t a question of heritage; it’s a question of historic justice.

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.