An anonymous donor of Lebanese-Jewish extraction, now living in New York, is funding the restoration of the Jewish cemetery in the city of Sidon. Tamar Pileggi writes:

The cemetery is located on the outskirts of the coastal city and is home to over 300 tombs scattered over 20,000 square meters, with some dating back to the 18th century. . . . Nagi Zeidan, a Lebanese Christian historian writing a book on the Jews of Lebanon, says he is leading restoration efforts on the donor’s behalf. . . .

According to Zeidan, the cemetery first fell into disrepair during the country’s fifteen-year civil war, when fighting gripped the southern coastal area. . . . He says the last known burial at the Sidon cemetery is dated 1985. . . . The community numbered more than 1,000 in 1956. . . . Jews left Lebanon steadily for Israel, Brazil, Europe, and the United States, but the community’s real exodus began after the 1967 Six-Day War.

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.