Last Friday, the archbishop of Canterbury delivered a speech to the House of Lords on “the shared values underpinning our national life and their role in shaping public-policy priorities.” Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi of the UK and a member of the House of Lords, contributed the following thoughts to the ensuing discussion:

[Over the past few decades], most people have come to believe that we are entitled to do whatever we like so long as it is within the law, and that the law itself should be limited to the prevention of harm to others.

But what harms others is not always immediately obvious. The breakdown of marriage and stable families has caused immense harm to several generations of children, psychologically, socially, and economically. The breakdown of codes of honor and responsibility have led to appalling behavior on the part of at least some senior figures in business and the financial sector, who have served themselves while those they were supposed to have served have borne the cost. There has been a palpable collapse of trust in one institution after another—an inevitable consequence of our failure to teach the concepts of duty, obligation, altruism, and the common good.

We have begun a journey down the road to moral relativism and individualism, which no society in history has survived for long. It was the road taken in Greece in the 3rd pre-Christian century and in Rome in the 1st century CE: two great civilizations that shortly thereafter declined and died. Britain has begun along the same trajectory, and it is bad news for our children, and for our grandchildren worse still.

Some elements of morality are universal: justice-as-fairness and the avoidance of inflicting harm. But others are particular. They are what give a country and culture its color, its distinctive handwriting in the book of life. The Britain I grew up in had extraordinary values and virtues. It honored tradition but was open to innovation. It valued family and community but also left space for eccentricity and individuality.

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.