Located not far from the center of Jerusalem, the National Library of Israel holds among its many treasures medieval haggadahs, ancient Hebrew manuscripts, and the suicide note of the Austrian Jewish writer Stefan Zweig. Aviya Kushner recounts its origins:

In 1890, a Jewish doctor in Bialystok, Yosef Khazanovich, started to charge his patients in books instead of rubles for making house calls. He sent 10,000 books to Jerusalem, and in 1902 Midrash Abarbanel was officially opened—the first free library in Palestine; that was the beginning of what is now the National Library. The Seventh Zionist Congress, held in 1905, decided to build a national library with Midrash Abarbanel as its foundation. So yes, there was a [national] library before there was a state. For years the library was run by its first director, Samuel Hugo Bergmann, a close friend of Franz Kafka. . . .

People—both visitors and employees—are the true delights of a visit to the National Library. On my visits to figure out what exactly it held, I checked out the trilingual circulation desk and saw Ḥasidim, Ḥaredim, secular students, and two women in hijabs; there were also career eccentrics, pulpit rabbis, and Gershom Scholem obsessives, along with two chatty women in the cafeteria who did not hesitate to tell me that they were researching Israeli songs. In the bathroom I encountered tourists. And everywhere, I saw scholars—passionate devotees of the library, many clearly in a state I can describe only as determined bliss.

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.