When David Ben-Gurion declared “the establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel” 72 years ago today (according to the Jewish calendar), very few people were aware of the decision, made just four days earlier, to call this new country “the state of Israel.” Most assumed its name would be Judea, although other contestants were Zion, Ever (the root of the word Hebrew), or simply “the Land of Israel.” In an essay drawn from a lecture in his new online course on Israeli independence, Martin Kramer writes:

From its outset, Zionism had talked about creating a Jewish state. . . . As Jewish was a derivative of Judea, this name might have seemed a logical choice. But according to the UN partition plan, virtually all of the traditional geographic area [historically known as] Judea was supposed to be either internationalized—Jerusalem and its environs—or part the Arab state. Calling a state Judea that didn’t include the geographic Judea would have been an anomaly.

But even if the state did wind up possessing a chunk of Judea, it would include much more than it—for example, the Negev. And how could the state be called Judea, when most of it was something else? It was problematic in another way. What would its citizens be called? Y’hudim, [i.e., Judeans, but also the Hebrew for “Jews”]? How would that comport with the Arab citizens of the state, projected in the partition plan to number half a million? So Judea was ruled out.

Erets Yisrael, [the Land of Israel], the biblical Hebrew name for Palestine, was ruled out because of the dangers involved in its irredentist flavor.

Ben-Gurion was the first to push for “Israel,” and managed to garner seven out of ten votes in favor of his suggestion from the provisional cabinet. Thus, writes Kramer, “the name ‘Israel’ came to the state by a process of elimination, [and] because there wasn’t time to come up with anything better. A majority voted for it—unenthusiastically.”

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.