Following the Hebrew calendar, the June 1967 conflict began 50 years ago yesterday. Israel has, for the occasion, made public the transcripts of the deliberations of its security cabinet—an inner circle convened to make crucial military and security decisions—during the year of the war. For the first four months of 1967, the key concern was how to respond to sporadic artillery and rifle fire from Syria, much of it directed at demilitarized zones and farmlands; only a few weeks before war broke out did the threat from Egypt, which precipitated the war, become clear. Yaacov Lozowick summarizes the deliberations:

The security cabinet of 1967 appears in these . . . transcripts as a group of serious, professional, and responsible decision-makers. While the ministers brought their worldviews to the table, they often didn’t vote on party lines, often did listen to one another, and generally managed to make decisions, albeit slowly and through compromises. These characteristics were not helpful in the maelstrom of the Six-Day War, when the cabinet receded in the face of its two most enigmatic members: [then-Prime Minister] Levi Eshkol, who can be read either as a weak figure or as a master manipulator; and Moshe Dayan, [who had left politics but returned as defense minister on the first day of the war], who comes across as an arrogant but talented prima donna.

In support of his contention that Israel should respond to Syria’s provocations not by relinquishing but by deliberately cultivating Israeli lands near the border, Eshkol told his colleagues:

We were in exile 2,000 years, and then there was struggle and a war. I can’t forget the outcry when we had to relinquish 2.5 dunams (less than an acre) near Jerusalem. How will we justify relinquishing 600 dunams [about 150 acres] here? And why not refrain from insisting on cultivating all the other fields where the Syrians shoot at us? What if we’d brought that question to this table? Would you have said we should wait, the Syrians have been humiliated, we need to give them time? If not now, when? If we don’t act now, we’ll regret it for generations.

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.