In the book of Exodus, God makes an explicit decision not to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and into Canaan via the short way—that is, what is now the Gaza strip—but instead to take them the long way through the Sinai Peninsula, so that they will enter Canaan from the east bank of the Jordan. This path, noted Yuval Levin a 2014 essay, means the Jews will first have to receive the law in the Sinai wilderness before they can achieve sovereignty in their land. In conversation with Jonathan Silver, Levin explains the lesson for today’s America, whose political system is founded on the oft-forgotten assumption that institutions—and religion not least of all—will safeguard citizens from the temptations of unrestricted liberty. (Audio, 50 minutes.)

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.