In 1924, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations (OU) began sending rabbis to inspect food-production factories so that it could vouch for the kashrut of their products. One of the OU’s first successful ventures was with H.J. Heinz, the Pittsburgh-based producers of ketchup and canned goods. David Schlitt writes:

In 1927, the H.J. Heinz Company became the first national brand with products approved by the Orthodox Union. Heinz also became the first company to tout the now ubiquitous Ⓤ on many of its labels. In fact, the symbol’s simple, durable design was the work of a collaboration between the Orthodox Union and the H.J. Heinz Company’s art department. . . .

Heinz’s year-’round Jewish-targeted advertising is impressive for its . . . familiarity with its audience. Informal descriptors like maykhl (“delicacy”) and m’ḥayah (roughly, “a delight”) abound. . . . [Around Passover], Heinz took the step of creating expensive and memorable ad campaigns warning its customers off its products during Passover.

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.