Last Monday, a surprising number of Ḥaredim broke with precedent to join their countrymen in marking Yom Hazikaron—the solemn day on which Israelis remember their fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism. This, writes Evelyn Gordon, taken together with recent survey data, suggests that divisions within Israeli society are becoming less profound:

Ḥaredim traditionally had two problems with Memorial Day, which falls one day before Independence Day. First, it’s an Israeli holiday rather than a Jewish one, and therefore uncomfortable for a community whose leaders have long viewed the secular Jewish state and its army with suspicion and even hostility. Second, many of the day’s specific observances—like the siren heralding a moment of silence or the wreaths laid on graves—are imported from non-Jewish customs. Ḥaredim, reasonably enough, feel a Jewish state should mark its mostly Jewish dead in a more Jewish fashion.

This year, however, was notably different. Although the main ḥaredi newspapers continued to ignore Memorial Day, leading ḥaredi websites and radio stations devoted extensive coverage to it, including feature stories on ḥaredi soldiers who fell in battle. Every Knesset member from the more moderate ḥaredi party (Shas) planned to attend Memorial Day ceremonies, and the head of the more extreme ḥaredi party (United Torah Judaism) even served as the state’s official representative at one such ceremony, down to laying a wreath at a military cemetery. . . . Ḥaredim also organized their own Memorial Day initiatives . . .

Like Israeli Arabs, Ḥaredim have no interest in assimilating into mainstream [Israeli] culture. And as in the Arab community, anti-Israel extremists haven’t disappeared. But, increasingly, Ḥaredim seek to integrate while retaining their own culture, and thereby to make their own unique contribution to the Jewish state.

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.