In 1815, the British poet Lord Byron published a cycle of “Hebrew melodies,” among them a poem mourning the absence of “Israel’s scatter’d race” from “Judah’s hills.” This poem was the product of Byron’s collaboration with a Jewish musician, as Vivian Eden explains (with audio):

Isaac Nathan (1790-1864), music master to Princess Charlotte (1796-1817), was the son of a cantor who claimed to have been a Polish king’s illegitimate son. In a letter, he cold-pitched a collaboration to the poet, whom he had never met: Byron would provide poems and he, Nathan, would provide a “selection from the favorite airs which are still sung in the religious Ceremonies of the Jews. Some of these have . . . been preserved by memory and tradition alone. . . . But the latitude given to the taste and genius of their performers has been the means of engrafting on the original Melodies a certain wildness and pathos, which have at length become the chief characteristic of the Sacred Songs of the Jews.”

An impious Christian but a fan of “wildness and pathos,” as well as a supporter of disenfranchised nations (he died preparing to defend the Greeks against the Turks), Byron befriended Nathan and contributed 29 poems, not all of them connected to “Hebrews.” . . . Hebrew Melodies was a bestseller in its day.

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.