As Jews fled from one land to another to escape persecution, they have tried to bring sacred objects—especially Torah scrolls—with them, if not always successfully. The Jerusalem Post recounts the stories of ten historic Torahs that either were transported by Jewish exiles or left behind and later rescued. This is one of them:

Last year, [Israel’s] foreign ministry dedicated a Torah for use at its office synagogue in Jerusalem that was smuggled out of Baghdad.

The scroll, estimated to be 150 to 200 years old, is believed to be from Kurdistan. When most of the country’s Jews fled to Israel after 1948, the scroll was left behind, as the Iraqi government had banned [departing Jews] from taking their property with them, and seized assets from those who left.

The ministry would not say just how the scroll arrived in Israel, but in 2006 or 2007 it ended up in the Israeli embassy in Jordan. When, in September 2011, the Israeli embassy in Cairo was attacked by a huge mob, the ministry decided to remove all extraneous items from its embassy in Amman in case of similar incidents. Among those items was the Iraqi Torah scroll, which was brought to the ministry in Jerusalem.

In November 2013, Amnon Israel, the new manager of storage and supplies for the ministry, noticed the scroll in a storage room on his first day. He sought out an expert in Torah restoration, and after six months of work it was ready for use.

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.