On the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, falling this year on Saturday night and Sunday, Jews will fast and commemorate historic national tragedies—most importantly, the destruction of the First and Second Temples, the loss of national sovereignty, and the exile. David Wolpe explains why, with national sovereignty restored and Jews free to return to their land, this day of mourning remains as important as ever:

There is wisdom in remembering, for it is the unremembered past, as psychoanalysts teach us, that controls us. What we remember we can integrate and understand. The destruction of the Temple inaugurated the wandering of the Jews. Many other tragedies have attached themselves to this date. . . . But it was the initial destruction that propelled the subsequent history, glorious and tragic, of a homeless people. . . .

This day of sadness also affirms that we live in an unredeemed world. As a people convinced the messiah has not come, we recognize that the human drama is a story without an ending. . . .

Cicero, the Roman orator who lived a century before his people burned the Second Temple, taught that not to remember your past is to remain forever a child. The Jewish people have lived too long to remain children. We will sit and weep for what was and hope for what might be. We will continue, in a turbulent world, to cherish the prayer that one day their tears will be wiped away. And to hope that there will be peace on God’s holy mountain, for knowledge of the Lord will fill the earth as the waters fill the sea.

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.