In the 1930s, a Jewish family visited Jerusalem and filmed what they saw, in color, with a 16mm camera. Isaac Tessler reports that, as part of a larger project, the amateur movie has been restored and made publicly available. (A 5-minute video and pictures can be found at the link below.)

The rare documentation includes footage of Old City alleys, the Mount Scopus Hebrew University, and above all, the Western Wall, long before the modern-day plaza existed, when only a narrow path separated it from the Moroccan Quarter. . . . The highly prized material was transferred to the Jerusalem Cinematheque Archive, which digitized it and made it accessible to the public.

Photos [from the archive] show ḥaredi Jews from the Old Yishuv, Muslims wearing traditional garb, women in elaborate hats, camels, donkeys, and beggars on street corners. The few cars in the streets belong to people who served in administrative positions.

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.