Shlomo Riskin, a leading figure in Modern Orthodoxy, has held the position of rabbi of Efrat for over 30 years. The Israeli chief rabbinate is now trying to force him from his post, as David M. Weinberg writes:

[The chief rabbinate] is taking advantage of a never-before-used loophole to “review” Rabbi Riskin’s tenure at seventy-five, and threatening to deny him the automatic five-year extension as city rabbi that he richly deserves.

It’s true that Riskin is a maverick religious leader, who has been willing to push the envelope of accepted public policy beyond conventional thinking within Orthodox circles. He has been a critic of the chief rabbinate and the rabbinical courts on various issues, including its policies on marriage, divorce, and conversion. More than that, he has established independent conversion courts and appointed women to formal positions as spiritual advisers.

Yet Riskin’s approach always has been one of pleasantness. He moves cautiously and civilly, always watchful to respect his senior colleagues and careful to anchor his moves within valid halakhic boundaries. Even those who disagree with him have no cause or right to strike at him so brutally. At most, they should continue to debate and challenge him. . . .

Crushing him will be considered open warfare against Modern Orthodoxy and religious Zionism—and I expect that those communities will fight back. They will fight back by doing the one thing they have debated and debated and so not wanted to do, and until now have tried to avoid: support the dismantling of the state rabbinate. But a nasty and radical rabbinate that humiliates Rabbi Riskin will have lost its legitimacy.

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.