Debuting in 2013, the Israeli television serial Shtisel, most of whose cast is secular, focuses on the internal dynamics of a ḥaredi family. It has proved surprisingly popular even with the Ultra-Orthodox themselves—despite the fact that their rabbis generally discourage or forbid television. Liel Leibovitz writes:

[I]t is clear that Shtisel heralds a new era in the fraught relationship between secular and ḥaredi Israelis. While the two groups maintain their traditional mutual animosity—the secular seeing the Ḥaredim as parasitic bums who live off taxpayer money while refusing to work or serve in the army, the Ḥaredim seeing the secular as heathens who have abandoned Judaism’s core tenets—Shtisel, it is now clear, has served as a bridge between these two feuding camps in two important ways. First, it has given many secular Israelis their first glimpse into ḥaredi life, portraying the otherwise foreign men in black hats and long black coats and women in head-coverings and ankle-length skirts as facing just the same familial and emotional tribulations as everyone else.

More importantly, perhaps, it has given Ḥaredim a prime-time lens through which to glance at themselves, not in the tightly controlled way typical of the community itself, where imperfections are frequently concealed and virtue portrayed as effortless and absolute, but in an intricate, sensitive, and candid manner, unafraid to take on even thorny topics like the difficulty some people have in finding a [mate] and the suffering of those who fail to couple early and well.

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.