The practice of marking ownership of a book by writing one’s name on the inside cover or first page dates back centuries. In some Orthodox circles today, it is common for owners to cite the opening of Psalm 24, “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof,” and continue with “but this book is in the possession of so-and-so.” Using examples from rare books and manuscripts in the British Library, Zsofi Buda notes some of the more colorful inscriptions used by Jews a few hundred years ago:

Just like Jewish scribes, Jewish owners also developed set phrases to make their marks, [such as], “A person should always write his name in his book lest someone come from the market and say ‘This book is mine,’ thus I have written my name.”

This is one of most popular phrases. Why people from the market? A marketplace was seen as a gathering place for strangers, idlers, and perhaps even rascals. Owners were concerned that such suspicious characters would claim their precious books. The owner of an 18th-century Passover Haggadah expresses his opinion about such false claims very explicitly: “A person should always write his name in his book lest Rabbi Robber and Rabbi Thief come from the market and say, ‘It is mine.’”

The owner of a halakhic miscellany composed an entire poem to declare his rights to the book. [To] make sure that his message got through to whoever might try to take his book, he added the first part of his little poem in Italian on the facing page.

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.