To commemorate the 41st anniversary of the October 1973 war, Israel State Archives has made public a series of recently declassified telegrams exchanged between Prime Minister Golda Meir’s office and the Israel embassy in Washington just before and during the outbreak of what would prove a decisive and traumatic conflict. Awakened at 3:50 a.m. on the morning of October 6, Meir received intelligence of a planned Egyptian and Syrian attack that evening. From the timeline provided by the Archives:

At 10:15 a.m. Golda Meir met with the American ambassador in Israel, Kenneth Keating, and updated him on the situation. In reply to a direct question, Golda promised that Israel would not initiate a pre-emptive strike, “although it would make the situation much easier for us”; but Egypt and Syria should be aware that Israel knew of their plans and would repel the attacks and hit back hard. She expressed confidence in Israeli victory, and suggested that the US should still try to talk to the Egyptians and the Soviets in order to prevent the outbreak of war, as reported in a telegram to the embassy in Washington.

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.