In honor of Jerusalem Day—which falls this Sunday, and celebrates the reunification of the city in 1967—the National Library of Israel has made available historic Israeli and Jordanian maps from the years when the eastern parts of the city were occupied by Jordan. David Cohen describes some of the more notable examples. (Reproductions of the maps can be found at the link below.)

An Israeli tourist map of western Jerusalem from the late 1950s was oriented with east at the top, instead of a standard northward orientation. . . . In other maps, both sides of the city are presented in detail, with the boundary line highlighted in the middle. These maps were designed to present tourists with a full picture of the city, but adapted to the new political realities created following the cease-fire in November 1948.

A pictorial map of Jerusalem, issued by [the distinguished] Steimatzky publishing house in 1955, was printed with the dividing line crossing Jerusalem. This was not a new map of Jerusalem, but a re-publication of a map that was first published about a decade earlier. A Jordanian tourist map that was published in Jerusalem in 1952 also shows the entire city of Jerusalem, with the borderline crossing it. It marks the various parts of the city as “UN-controlled territories,” “Jewish-controlled territory,” and “no-man’s land.”

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.