In the 1960s, Elie Wiesel worked as a journalist for the Forverts, then one of America’s leading Yiddish papers. Herewith, a translated excerpt from the column he wrote from Israel immediately after its stunning victory in June 1967:

Future generations will probably never believe it. Teachers will have a hard time convincing their students that what sounds legendary actually occurred. The children will naturally swallow each word, but later on, as adults, they’ll nod their heads and smile, remarking that these were fantasies of history.

They won’t believe that this small state, surrounded by hatred, fire, and murder, had so quickly managed a miracle. It will be hard to describe how, amid a sea of hatred, a tiny army drove off and humiliated several well-equipped military hordes of who knows how many Arab countries.

How does the acclaimed scholar and talmudic genius Saul Lieberman put it? In another 2,000 years, people will consider these events the way we think of descriptions of the Maccabees and their victories. Did I say another 2,000 years? No, make that: in another year, or even tomorrow. . . .

We all need to recite the Hallel thanksgiving prayer for being granted the privilege of witnessing these events. The battle has not yet ended, but the enemy has already retreated and won’t easily recover.

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.