While Jews have worshipped at the Western Wall nearly continuously since the Second Temple’s destruction, Ottoman policy forbade any sort of formal congregational prayer. The British Mandatory authority tried to preserve the existing status quo, but during the 1920s the site saw periodic outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence. In August 1929, just after the bloody pogrom in Hebron, three proposals emerged for placing the Wall and the area in front of it under Jewish control. Two of these proposals came from Jews, but not the third, which until now has been forgotten. Steven E. Zipperstein writes:

Prince Mohammad Ali Pasha of Egypt . . . was the uncle of, and later the regent to, Farouk, the future king of Egypt. Those who knew Ali Pasha regarded him as a “very liberal-minded man,” with a “courtly bearing.” . . . The Jewish, Alexandria-based lawyer Alec Alexander once described Ali Pasha as “the one person who could use his good offices to bring about peace between Muslims and Jews.”

On that fateful day of August 29, 1929, Ali Pasha, while on a visit to Istanbul, hand-delivered to the British ambassador to Turkey, Sir George Clerk, a letter addressed to the high commissioner chancellor in Jerusalem. The letter contained a stunning proposal from Ali Pasha for settling the Muslim-Jewish dispute over the Western Wall.

Ali Pasha’s letter explained that “the Mohametans may be willing to accept a sum of money which would help them to do good for the community, and as the Jews are rich,” they ought to be willing to pay for the Wall, thus preventing further violence and ill will. He went on to clarify that “Mohametans and Arabs will not accept a small sum such as £10,000 or even £20,000 for a matter in which their honor is so far involved,” but that £100,000 would certainly be enough. Zipperstein adds:

The letter . . . seriously undermines Muslim claims regarding the holiness of the Buraq, [as the site is known in Arabic]. Surely Ali Pasha would never have dreamed of proposing to sell any truly sacred Muslim shrines, such as the Dome of the Rock or the al-Aqsa Mosque, to the Jews. . . . Indeed, no evidence exists of any Muslim prayer or veneration at the Buraq since the 7th-century Muslim conquest of Jerusalem.

The ambassador passed the letter on to the Foreign Office, which promptly filed it away and let it linger in obscurity.

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.