In the city of Qamishlo, located in the Kurdish-ruled enclave of Syria known as Rojava, it is unlikely that more than one Jew remains. But the synagogue still stands, and Philipp Breu was able to visit and take photographs. He writes:

The building is guarded by a Syrian Kurd named Kamiran Hassan and he is keen to show visitors around. . . . Over the past years, the condition of the furniture has worsened and he is currently emptying both the synagogue and the yeshiva [attached to it] to clean and repaint some metal elements. He has asked me not to take too many photos of the courtyard because he feels a bit ashamed that it looks untidy, as three turkeys are currently roaming around the vicinity.

Apart from that, everything seems in dusty, but okay condition, although the books and religious papers lying around should be kept in a more preservative way, but the guard is unable to do so, since he doesn’t have any money. He wasn’t exactly sure of the age of the building, and according to him, the synagogue doesn’t have a name, or he is unaware of it. He also showed me the container for the Torah of the synagogue, which was empty. According to him, the Torah was evacuated already at the end of the 1940s by American Jews.

Breu’s photographs of the synagogue can be found at the link below.

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.