Monday marks the 45th anniversary of the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, arch-foe of the state of Israel. Herewith, a summary of Israeli government reactions, based on declassified documents and reports in the contemporary press:

[At a cabinet meeting the day after Nasser’s death], Prime Minister Golda Meir . . . reported that President Zalman Shazar wanted to make a radio statement on Nasser’s death. The tourism minister, Moshe Kol, said there was no reason for generosity toward Nasser: his policies were a failure and, while driving out the British and the French, he had let in the Russians. Nasser could have been a great leader, [said Kol], but had wasted his efforts on trying to destroy Israel. However, a new ruler in Egypt might take a different line, and Kol agreed with [Moshe] Dayan that Israel should take the initiative.

Several ministers favored an official statement by Shazar or Golda, but the interior minister, Yosef Burg, said they should approach the question “without malice and without hypocrisy.” Surely, [argued Burg], the Jewish community of Shushan would not have sent a telegram of sympathy to the family of Haman (who had plotted to destroy the Jews).

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.