The 19th century saw the rise of a new genre: the guidebook for tourists, associated above all with the Baedekers of Germany. In a survey of several guidebooks and travelogues written by Europeans about their visits to the Holy Land, Jerold Auerbach cites the description of the Western Wall from Reverend D.A. Randall’s Egypt, Sinai, and the Holy Land:

At “the Jews’ Place of Wailing,” Randall noted that Friday afternoon was “the special time” for “these sorrow-stricken children of Abraham . . . to congregate here and weep for the departed glory of their city and temple.” He was riveted by the “venerable old men” who “seemed overpowered by their deep and apparently heartfelt emotions; their strong frames trembled, the great tears rolled like rain drops down their cheeks, and they wept aloud.” He was so deeply touched that “almost before I was conscious of it, I was weeping with them.” Amid their “tears and lamentations,” Randall saw “the traces of an omniscient and overruling God.”

Less sympathetic was the account of the American writer Charles W. Elliott:

Elliott described Jerusalem as “a Muslim and Oriental town” with a Jewish Quarter that “a man may smell far off.” Its alleys and courts, “unspeakably offensive to eye and nostril, . . . reek with decaying fruit, dead animals, and human filth . . . in the midst of which . . . innumerable armies of rats and lizards race and fight.” Around its edifices “reek and starve about 4,000 Israelites, many of them living in a state of filth . . . unlike the condition of their clean, bright ancestors.”

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.