In the long history of the Diaspora, Jews have preserved Hebrew as a ritual language almost wherever they have gone; they have also developed their own vernaculars (of which Yiddish is the best known), usually based on local tongues and written in the Hebrew alphabet. Drawing on Bernard Spolsky’s The Languages of the Jews, Sarah Bunin Benor gives some examples of the Jewish linguistic panoply:

The Greek-speaking Jewish community in early-modern Corfu [then under Venetian rule], for example, was absorbed by speakers of Apulian (an Italian dialect), but they preserved some Greek words and customs, such as reading Greek poems on the fast of Tisha b’Av. In early 20th-century Cairo, Egypt, Jewish groups from several regions converged, yielding a meeting place of Egyptian Arabic, Arabic from other North African countries, Ladino, Yiddish, and Russian—in addition to Italian, French, and English, international languages adopted by middle- and upper-class Jews. At one point, Cairo even had two newspapers and a theater troupe in Yiddish. And even before the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, Jews in the Holy Land used Hebrew as a lingua franca; Spolsky gives the example of a Jew from Kabul and a Jew from California speaking Hebrew in mid-19th-century Palestine.

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.