According to ancient letters supposedly received by the 10th-century Spanish Jewish scholar and statesman Ḥasdai ibn Shaprut, the Khazar empire—located in Transcaucasia and what is now southern Ukraine and Russia—had been led by their king to convert to Judaism. While the theory, championed by Arthur Koestler and currently beloved by anti-Semites, that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are descended primarily from the Khazars has been debunked many times over, some scholars have recently gone even further to argue that the entire story of the Khazar conversion was a myth. Henry Abramson reviews the evidence and the current debate. (Video, 15 minutes.)

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.