In The Book Smugglers, David Fishman tells the story of a group of literary figures from the Vilna Ghetto, led by the poet and resistance fighter Shmerke Kaczerginski, who risked their lives to save their city’s enormous repository of Jewish books and manuscripts from destruction. Cecile Kuznitz writes in her review:

[W]ithin six months of the arrival of the German army [in Vilna] on June 22, 1941, over half of the city’s Jews had been shot and buried in mass graves at Ponar on Vilna’s outskirts. Living Jews were not the Nazis’ only target. A mere week after the initial Nazi foray into Vilna a member of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR), the Nazi agency in charge of looting cultural property in occupied territory, arrived to survey local libraries, museums, and art collections.

Vilna, which was known as the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” was a special prize. Its legendary status as a center of Jewish learning was symbolized by two great institutions. The Strashun Library stood in the heart of the traditional Jewish quarter and was famous for its collection of rabbinic works. In a newer part of the city stood the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut (Jewish Scholarly Institute, known by its acronym YIVO), . . . which was rooted in a secular vision of the Jewish people as a modern nation. . . .

When the Nazi archivist-looters of the ERR returned to Vilna in 1942, they set up several sorting centers, including one in the YIVO building itself. There they assembled a team of slave laborers who were forced to comb through the YIVO collections as well as books, documents, and art and ritual objects looted from local libraries, museums, and synagogues. The most valuable were shipped to Germany to be used for “Jewish research without Jews,” once the work of extermination had been completed. As it became clear that what was not shipped away would be destroyed, the workers faced a heartrending predicament. . . . [They thus] decided to organize the “paper brigade.”

As Fishman relates, after Germany’s defeat the surviving members of the paper brigade once again had to save the material they had smuggled out of the ghetto or hidden within its walls, this time from the city’s new Soviet rulers.

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.