A letter from Heinrich Himmler—the head of the SS and the key official behind the planning and implementation of the Holocaust—to Amin Haj al-Husseini, the former grand mufti of Jerusalem, was recently discovered in Israel’s National Library. Dated to 1943, the letter expresses German solidarity with Palestinian Arabs in undoing the “criminal” Balfour Declaration. Joy Bernard writes:

The Nazi commander . . . wrote to the Muslim leader that “the joint recognition of the enemy, [i.e., the Jew], and the joint battle against him are what creates the firm allegiance between Germany and freedom-seeking Muslims all over the world.”

Himmler went on to tell the mufti . . . that his country was closely following the Palestinian resistance against the Balfour Declaration. “The National-Socialist movement of Greater Germany has made its fight against world Jewry a guiding principle since its very beginning,” Himmler wrote. “For that reason [the movement] has been closely following the battle of freedom-seeking Arabs, especially in Palestine, against the Jewish invaders,” the Nazi leader added.

He finished his warm letter to the mufti by writing: “In this spirit, I am happy to extend to you, on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, warm wishes for the continuation of your battle until the certain final victory.”

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.