The Israeli Opera recently held its fifth annual opera festival at Masada—the mountaintop fortress in the Judean Desert where a group of besieged Jewish rebels killed themselves rather than surrender to Roman legionaries in 73 CE. William Littler reports:

Each year for the past five, a temporary stage has been set up in the desert near the mountain’s base, along with bleachers for 7,000 people, and every June visitors from all over Israel and abroad congregate for an operatic experience like no other. Opera in the desert? Outdoors? And amplified? The sheer improbability of it all is breathtaking. But then, so is Masada, as anyone who takes a cable car or walks to the ruins on its summit quickly appreciates. . . .

Not that the performances I witnessed of Puccini’s Tosca and Orff’s Carmina Burana as a guest of the Ministry of Tourism were entirely satisfying from a purely musical point of view. Given the physical conditions of performing in the desert, how could they be?

People come here to participate in an event, some of them staying in Dead Sea resort hotels, some taking a long drive from Jerusalem. In either case they are rewarded with full-scale productions accompanied by a large orchestra and chorus.

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.