In the late 7th century, the forces of the Umayyad caliphate were on the march westward from Egypt, eager to expand their empire. They soon found themselves fighting a confederation of Berber tribes led by a woman named Dihya al-Kahina, who to this day remains the stuff of legend. Arab accounts portray her as a sorceress, while some Algerian Jewish folklore has her as an anti-Semitic ogre. But the great 14th-century Arab historian ibn Khaldun notes that her tribe were converts to Judaism, and this is likely the origin of the claim that she was a Jew, made popular by the early 20th-century journalist Nahum Slouschz in his travelogue of North African Jewry. Ushi Derman recounts Slouschz’s version of her story:

Dihya offered peace, but the Muslim commander would not accept unless she acknowledged the authority of the caliph and adopted Islam, an ultimatum she rejected scornfully. According to Slouschz, she was a descendant of a priestly family deported from Judea by Pharaoh Necho in the days of King Josiah. She did not intend to enter the family history as a leader who caused yet another deportation of the dynasty, and certainly did not intend to convert to Islam. “I shall die in the religion I was born to,” she answered the commander’s demands, and went on forging her steel sword.

Berber tribes from all over the Maghreb arrived to join Kahina in her campaign, which they gloriously won after exhausting battles. Defeated and ashamed, the Arab general had to escape with what was left of his troops to Tripoli, where he had to face the caliph and tell him of his defeat. Kahina then chased his troops all the way to Carthage, and then became the city’s ruler [as well]. . . .

It took [the Arab armies] five years to recover from the losses caused in the battle with Dihya. [But they then returned with] a much larger force and managed to conquer Carthage and to defeat the Berbers. . . . After her defeat, Kahina took her own life by falling into a deep well. The Muslims pulled out her body, severed her head, and sent it to the caliph. The well is still called the Kahina Well.

Despite Slouschz’s claims, most modern scholars doubt that Kahina was in fact Jewish.

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.