The ancient city of Dandan-Uiliq, abandoned centuries ago, is located in the Xinjiang region, where Communist China is currently carrying out one of its most brutal campaigns of persecution. Once the city was an important stop along the Silk Road. In 1901, an excavation of the ruins of a Buddhist monastery there revealed an ancient letter written in Hebrew script. At the time of its writing, Persian-speaking Jewish merchants were involved in trade across Eurasia, from southwestern Russia to the Chinese heartland. Ursula Sims-Williams explains how another recent discovery helped make sense of the document:

The document was provisionally dated to the end of the 8th century CE, when the site was abandoned, and this dating was confirmed by [modern scientific] analysis. . . . The letter proved to be written in Judeo-Persian, i.e. Persian written in Hebrew script. However since the beginning and end of each line was missing, there was only a limited amount of contextual information to be deduced. Mention of sheep trading and cloth indicates the document’s commercial nature and a reference to the author having written “more than twenty letters” attests perhaps to a thriving trade. There is also an intriguing request for a harp required for instructing a girl how to play.

In 2004, however, an almost intact leaf of a similar document was acquired by the National Library of China [that] appears to be the initial page of possibly the same letter. . . . The letter is from a Persian-speaking Jew of Khotan . . . on the subject of sheep trading. It lists bribes to officials [that] include a vase, scent, silk cloth, raw silk, sugar, and other items not yet fully understood. Perhaps the most important information was the news from [the nearby city of] Kashgar that “they killed and captured all the Tibetans.” The writer himself contributed “a sum worth 100 strings of coins, or 100,000 coins” for the war effort.

Taking both parts together the Dandan-Uiliq letter is probably the oldest surviving document of substance to be written in early New Persian, marking the first phase of the Persian language after the Islamic conquest.

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.