By October 24, 1973, Israel had turned the tide of the war it was fighting against both Egypt and Syria, and both countries’ forces were on the run. Leonid Brezhnev, then the ruler of the Soviet Union, panicked at the prospect of the defeat of his two most important Middle Eastern allies—to an extent made clear by documents made public only recently. Eric Cortellessa writes:

According to letters and notes collected and translated by the Woodrow Wilson Center, Brezhnev sent a letter to then-President Richard Nixon warning him that he would send troops to the Middle East if both countries did not act together to curb the Israelis. . . .

[In particular], the Soviets had a vested interest in Egypt, one of its major client states. The new documents show that Brezhnev sought to take advantage of Nixon’s political strife back in America —this was during the apex of the Watergate scandal—to secure an Arab victory. . . .

[T]hen-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger . . . first received Brezhnev’s threatening letter to Nixon. Given the U.S. president’s precarious position—and the fact that he was indisposed when the letter came in—Kissinger consulted with then-White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig and other national-security officials, who jointly decided to move America’s nuclear alert level to Defcon 3.

The new documents show that this was not just a reaction to the Soviets’ sending a naval brigade into the Mediterranean, which was believed to be the reason at the time. It was, in fact, because intelligence reports found that a Soviet ship believed to be carrying nuclear weapons was en route for the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

The Soviets backed down, and the next day Israel and its enemies agreed to a cease-fire.

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.