During the Roman siege of the Galilean town of Jotapata (Yodfat) in 67 CE, the Jewish commander Josephus, seeing (by his own later account) that defeat was at hand, made a pact with his comrades to run on each other’s swords rather than be captured. After the others were dead, he instead surrendered, flattered his way into the good graces of the Roman general, and lived the rest of his life comfortably in Rome writing books about Jews and Judaism. Martin Goodman’s Josephus’ “The Jewish War”: A Biography is a history of the best-known of those books. David Polansky writes in his review:

As befits its author, who moved between such different worlds in his own lifetime, The Jewish War’s legacy proves complex. It owed its initial dissemination (and, arguably, preservation) to the early Christians, whose own purposes differed vastly from Josephus’. Though both Josephus and his early Christian readers were concerned with accounting for the destruction visited upon the Judeans, Josephus attributed it to a combination of elite corruption and imprudent radicalism, as opposed to their rejection of Jesus. Early Christians, such as Eusebius and Cyril of Alexandria, were primarily interested in demonstrating the terrible punishment the Jews incurred through their [alleged] complicity in the martyrdom of Jesus Christ. (One especially gruesome episode of a starving Jerusalemite eating her own child was a favorite.)

It would take nearly a millennium for The Jewish War to be rediscovered by Jews themselves, albeit as only one source for a composite narrative of the destruction of Jerusalem,  which entered the medieval rabbinic canon under the name Sefer Yosippon, [and] would eclipse Josephus’ text among pious European Jews for centuries thenceforward.

For early Zionists, The Jewish War, written in Greek and aspiring to the scholarly rigor of other classical historical texts, offered authoritative proof of the ancient Jews’ status as a people with rooted attachment to the Levant. At the same time, the Zionists were (and in some cases still are) perhaps uniquely concerned with the controversial status of the historian who wrote it. How far could a work by such a man be trusted?

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.