Centuries before Cecil B. DeMille, a Greek-speaking Jew named Ezekiel living in the Egyptian city of Alexandria adapted the story of Moses’ childhood, the Exodus from Egypt, and the Golden Calf into a contemporary medium. Now Ezekiel’s dramatic poem, known as The Exagoge, has itself been adapted in a 21st-century format by the playwright Aaron Henne, and debuted this past weekend in Los Angeles. John Rosove writes:

Henne’s script is multilayered and textured, and the action shifts back and forth from the biblical era to the contemporary world. Moses is played by all the actors using a mask that they pass between them, and we hear Moses’ inner thoughts, conflicts, challenges, fears, and prophetic visions as well as the feelings, thoughts, and perspectives of his Midianite wife Tzippora and father in-law Jethro, Pharaoh, and others from both the ancient and modern worlds including the struggles of Vietnamese, Mexican, Syrian, Holocaust-era, and Russian Jewish refugees who, though escaping the violence and oppression at home, encounter hardship, quotas, racism, and discrimination in the United States.

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.