In a recently discovered letter, James Murray, the founding editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, responds to a query about why he did not include an entry for anti-Semitism. Zack Rothbart writes:

The reasons for the word’s exclusion are elaborated by Murray in the letter, which he wrote on July 5, 1900 to Claude Montefiore, a scholar, ardent anti-Zionist, and scion of the renowned British Jewish family. Montefiore was . . . the great-nephew of Moses Montefiore, one of the most important early supporters of the modern Zionist movement.

Besides the fact that “the material for anti- words was so enormous that much violence had to be employed” to [choose which should be included], Murray noted [that at the time he began work on the dictionary] “Anti-Semite and its family were then probably very new in English use, and not thought likely to be more than passing nonce-words. . . . Would that Anti-Semitism had had no more than a fleeting interest!”

Interestingly, the term Semitism did appear in the first edition of the dictionary, along with mention of the fact that in “recent use,” it had already come to be associated with “Jewish ideas or Jewish influence in policy and society.”

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.