In May of this year the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the first draft of Israel’s declaration of independence belonged to the nation and not to the family of the man who wrote it. (The family was trying to sell the draft, having fallen on hard times.) That would perhaps seem obvious, but less obvious—indeed, mostly forgotten—is the story of that man, Mordechai Beham, and his work.

In April 1948, Beham, a lawyer then just thirty-one years old, was given the task of drafting a declaration of independence for the state not yet born. (Under the massive weight of the job, he at one point burst into tears at the dining table.) Yaacov Lozowick, formerly Israel’s state archivist, has the tale:

At some point, the young attorney started jotting down notes. First, a page of quotations from famous documents, such as, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. . . . ” And also, “Behold, I have set the land before you, go in and possess the land the Lord swore unto your fathers” (Deuteronomy 1:8). Having written down four or five quotations, all in English, he then took another sheet of paper and wrote a first outline of a “Declaration of a Jewish State,” still in English. On a third sheet of paper, he then translated what he had written into Hebrew.

On Sunday, April 25, Beham showed his draft to [his boss]. They made numerous editorial corrections. Two days later there was a typed version, thanks to Mrs. Levy, the office secretary. Beham then wrote out a one-page description of what they were trying to do. By the time the draft moved on to other potential authors, he had authored a total of five sheets of paper.

Over the next three weeks, Beham’s draft was reworked over and over by dozens of people; the task was brought to an end about an hour before the final version was proclaimed by David Ben-Gurion on May 14.

Beham’s involvement went unremembered until the late 1990s, when a law professor named Yoram Schachar went looking for the roots of the declaration. He “uncovered Beham’s role and went to visit his widow; it turned out that she still had the papers in a box.” Schachar then compared the final draft with the first:

Although next to none of Beham’s original words made their way all the way through the process into the final text, its structure did. Beham had decided the declaration should have two segments, one presenting the history of the Jews, the second building upon it to proclaim future intents. Everyone who came after him worked within that structure.

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.