The Israeli novelist Irit Linur has translated books by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens into Hebrew, and crafted a TV mini-series based on Pride & Prejudice. She also famously canceled her subscription to Haaretz in an open letter blasting its “radical leftism” and “anti-Zionism . . . often turned into malevolent and stupid journalism.” Her own novels, although sometimes set to the backdrop of war, avoid the issues of politics and identity so often associated with Israeli literature. Noga Emanuel writes:

Incontestably, the triumvirate of the greatest [living Israeli] authors consists of Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman. Their novels and writings are read in America, Europe, and beyond, perhaps because a certain Israeli existential angst is organic to their oeuvre. As Tolstoy and Dostoevsky explored the darkest and deepest recesses of what it means to be Russian, so these authors of the Hebrew canon bore into the battered identity of the Israeli psyche. . . .

Perhaps this is why, when I stumbled upon Irit Linur’s first novel Shirat ha-Sirena (“The Siren’s Song”), it felt like I’d been touched by the Greek god Zephyr, that bringer of the fresh wind and the spring rains. In the irreverent voice of its mischievous thirty-something female lead, here was a novel—finally!—about the daily lives of Israelis as they pursue their own all-too-human projects.

Irit Linur’s novels have not been translated into English. Perhaps that is because her Israeli characters are thought not to be interesting to a readership weaned on the Yehoshua-Oz-Grossman school of national soul-searching.

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.