Currently Israeli scientists are among those working to produce a treatment or vaccine for the coronavirus; over a century ago it was a Jew named Waldemar (a/k/a Mordechai Wolff) Haffkine who was performing cutting-edge research on how to treat the most dangerous epidemics. Born in Russia in 1860, Haffkine apprenticed himself to Louis Pasteur. Udi Edery tells his story:

Haffkine . . . after tireless research, managed to develop a cholera vaccine based on attenuated bacteria. People may have been dying in masses of a rampant pandemic, but no one stepped up to support Haffkine’s research. He decided to take a drastic step . . . to prove the vaccine’s credibility: he picked up a syringe full of an attenuated strain of cholera, inserted the needle into his arm, and injected the disease straight into his bloodstream.

Although this trial was successful, Haffkine failed to convince the French authorities or medical establishment to get on board. Britain, by contrast, was eager to stop the cholera outbreaks ravaging India, and sent Haffkine to Bangladesh to administer inoculations there. But this wasn’t the end of Haffkine’s success:

An outbreak of another disease, the bubonic plague in Bombay, impelled the Indian authorities to turn to Haffkine again to help them find a vaccine. In January 1897, after three months of intensive work, Haffkine once again inoculated himself with an experimental vaccine for the plague. [It] worked. Haffkine very quickly started to experiment on other people.

In 1902, Haffkine arrived at the village of Mulkowal in order to inoculate the villagers. Several days after the treatment was given, nineteen villagers died from tetanus. Accusatory fingers immediately pointed at Haffkine, with complaints emerging that something had gone wrong with one of the vaccine bottles.

Rumor spread like wildfire that the vaccine was infected with tetanus. A commission of inquiry was appointed which found Haffkine guilty. Soon after, he was deported back to England in shame. The episode came to be known as the “Little Dreyfus Affair,” and was accompanied by an air of anti-Semitism, which Haffkine was familiar with from his life in Russia.

Later exonerated, Haffkine retired in 1914, devoting the rest of his life to Jewish and Zionist activism.

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.