At the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, malaria was such a severe problem in the swampy areas of the land of Israel that the disease came close to crippling Britain’s military efforts against the Ottomans. In the early years of British rule, it was generally assumed that only massive drainage projects, far too expensive for Jewish settlements to undertake, could eliminate or even reduce the prevalence of malaria. But Louis Brandeis—who had been infected with the disease in his childhood—believed that the problem required a solution and, after his 1919 visit to Palestine, tasked the Zionist public-health expert Israel Kligler with fixing it. Anton Alexander writes:

In December 1920, Kligler went to Palestine to direct the laboratories of Hadassah Hospital and also with a view of coming to grips with the malaria situation. After arriving and quickly studying the situation, he agreed with Brandeis that if malaria could not be eliminated in Palestine, a Jewish homeland there was in all probability impossible. . . .

Kligler’s plan for malaria elimination [was] to focus principally on the destruction of the breeding sites of the mosquito that carried the disease. His proposed method included engaging with the whole rural Palestine population to . . . secure the cooperation of both Arab and Jewish local communities who would also maintain the anti-malaria [efforts] which he intended to carry out, and thereby ensure the mosquito did not return to their districts.

Kligler’s [innovation] was to think not of malaria control [as something to be effected by] thousands of employed personnel, but to seek instead malaria elimination through involvement of the population by culturally sensitive education. Without Brandeis’s personal financial contribution toward his experimental demonstrations, Kligler could never have demonstrated the success of his approach. And subsequently, as a result of the successful demonstrations, future funding was secured to begin malaria-elimination coverage of the whole country. . . .

Palestine [thus] in 1922 became the first place anywhere to implement a successful national malaria campaign. The first breach of the [regnant] barrier posed by fatalism with regard to malaria elimination began 100 years ago in Palestine. [In Theodor Herzl’s words], “If you will it, it is no dream.”

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.