Even before being appointed the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine in 1919, Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) had become the foremost theorist of religious Zionism. Employing an innovative reading of Jewish mystical texts blended with various ideas from European thought, Kook developed a theological interpretation of history that he employed to show why his era was the appropriate time for a return to Zion. Yehudah Mirsky explains (free registration required):

In the kabbalistic doctrine of the [ten] s’firot [divine emanations], the tenth s’firah is the meeting place of divinity and the world; it is thus at one and the same time the Oral Torah (created by human interpretation [of the written text]), . . . the land of Israel, the [religious community] of Israel, and the immanent divine presence or Sh’khinah. This cluster of related mystical concepts was the lens through which [Kook] viewed nationalism and Zionism, and those developments shaped his new readings of Kabbalah. . . . [J]ust as the tenth s’firah is the repository for the spiritual energies of all the rest, the Jewish people are the repository for the spiritual energies of humanity, the “idealized distillation” of the history, beliefs, and ideals of the nation.

Contemporary nationalism was for Kook the vessel of the internally diverse spiritual life of mankind. “In our time, after the differentiation into nations, nobody can receive his spiritual influences outside of the garment of the specific channel of his nation.” But in keeping with his dialectical perspective, universal love must feature alongside national feeling in a God-saturated world. “Love of all creatures must live in the heart and soul, love for every individual, for all the nations.” Indeed, the existence of nations is only a waystation until the joining of all humanity in a single family.

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.