From June 7 to July 15, 1099, the armies of the First Crusade laid siege to Jerusalem, then ruled by the Fatimid caliphate. According to two 12th-century accounts, the defenders dug a moat around the city as a protective measure, which took the Crusaders several attempts to cross. Archaeologists exploring the edges of the Old City have finished excavating the ditch, writes Amanda Borschel-Dan:

[The excavation’s] co-director Shimon Gibson laughingly said that contrary to popular imagination, the moat was most certainly not filled with water and patrolling crocodiles. Rather, it was a somewhat shallow ditch (thirteen-feet deep), he said, which would have been “an annoyance” to the invading Crusaders who could not stand their siege tower against the wall and gain a foothold into the city. In addition to the dry moat, other remnants of war include slingshots, arrowheads and pendant crosses. . . .

According to two chronicles, [the French commander] Raymond of Saint-Gilles offered his soldiers a gold dinar to fill the moat under the cover of night so a surprise siege tower could be placed next to the wall. While trying to break through, the Crusaders would have suffered showers of arrows . . . and cauldrons of boiling olive oil, said Gibson.

Despite the hardships [involved], the soldiers were successful in filling the ditch and the tower was built— but it was immediately burned down by the Fatimid defenders. A day later, other Crusader forces on the northern side of the city breached the walls. After their victory, the Crusaders spent another week slaughtering the city’s [Muslim and Jewish] inhabitants.

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.