Most likely born in Baghdad, the Jewish philosopher Sa’d ibn Mansur Ibn Kammuna died in 1284; his writings, all of which were in Arabic, influenced both Jewish and Muslim thinkers of the era. His thought draws upon Sufism, the Islamic philosophers Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali, and the great Sephardi philosophers Judah Halevi and Moses Maimonides, among many other sources. Describing one of Ibn Kammuna’s books, recently translated into English by Tzvi Langermann, Alan Brill writes:

Ibn Kammuna’s Subtle Insights Concerning Knowledge and Practice is a goldmine of ethics, ritual, piety, and religious thought, [filled with] valuable [information] about the medieval Jewish experience and its culture.

Written for the newly appointed Muslim governor of Isfahan, [a city now in Iran and then ruled by an offshoot of the Mongol empire], this compact treatise and philosophical guidebook includes a wide‑ranging and accessible set of essays on ethics, psychology, political philosophy, and the unity of God.

To Kammuna, [society is composed of] two elements: the common people who follow religion based on the authority of prophecy and the philosopher- intellectuals who have a philosophic religion. This book presents what Langermann calls “Abrahamic philosophic piety,” [based on the twin] principles of God and prophecy. Allah, Theos, and the God of the Hebrew Bible are automatically assumed to be the same universal Deity.

Yet, adds Langermann, in conversation with Brill, the abstract universalism Ibn Khammuna embraces in this book is not, at least on its own, representative of his thought as a whole:

[Ibn Khammuna’s book comparing the three monotheistic religions], Examination of the Three Faiths, has a distinctly pro-Jewish bias, which was not lost on Christian and Muslim readers. It is not overtly polemical; he does not attack any other religion. . . . However, Judaism does come out looking the best of the three in that book. Similarly, his relatively unknown treatise comparing Rabbinic Judaism with Karaism, [a sect that rejected the Talmud and the rabbinic tradition], clearly favors the Rabbinites.

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.