Elinor, the protagonist and narrator of Gail Hareven’s newly translated novel, Lies: First Person, leads a quiet life in Jerusalem, keeping the memory of her unhappy childhood and neglectful parents at a safe distance. Her tranquility is shattered when of a male relative who brutally abused her sister resurfaces. Much of what makes the novel compelling, writes Adam Kirsch, is that the abuser, Aaron Gotthilf, is also a controversial writer:

If this story were being told by an American novelist, it might remain on the level of a psychological case study. But Hareven guides Lies, First Person onto the plane of allegory, by giving it a specifically Jewish symbolic dimension. Aaron Gotthilf, it turns out, is not just a villain in Elinor’s eyes. He is a figure of loathing in the broader Jewish community because of a book he wrote—the very book he was working on during that summer in the family hotel.

This book, Hitler, First Person, was a literary attempt to fathom the secret of Hitler’s evil by entering into his imaginative life—by using him as a narrator. Such an attempt brought down on Gotthilf a firestorm of criticism, and one Holocaust survivor even tried to throw acid in his face. When Elinor herself reads the book, she is left speechless with horror: the evil that Aaron tried to conjure in print seems all too consonant with the evil he did in real life.

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.