Although the tomb of Queen Helena of Adiabene (a kingdom located in what is now Iraq) is located in the West Bank city of Nablus (Shechem), it has been under French control since 1885. French authorities announced that, for the first time, it will be opened to visitors. Hagay Hacohen explains the site’s history:

The people of the ancient kingdom of Adiabene had converted to Judaism in the 1st century CE, while Queen Helena moved to Jerusalem to build palaces for herself and her sons, Izates bar Monobaz and Monobaz II, [who are buried there as well]. The French archaeologist Louis Félicien de Saulcy, who studied the site in 1863, thought he had found the burials grounds of the House of David.

The Jewish community, outraged by de Saulcy’s removal of human remains—which is against Jewish religious law—demanded he stop his work. The French archaeologist eventually did so, but not before he made sure the discovered sarcophagi and other findings would be shipped to Paris, where today they are preserved at the Louvre.

To prevent further damages, the site was bought by the French-Jewish Péreire family and given to the government of France on the condition it would keep the site for the benefit of the Jewish people.

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.