In her recent novel, The Secret Chord, Geraldine Brooks attempts to recreate the story of King David. David Wolpe deems the book “skillful and eloquent,” and attributes part of its success to Brooks’s choice of narrator:

Brooks succeeds here by fashioning a compelling narrative voice in the prophet Nathan. In the Bible itself, Nathan plays a key role in the Bathsheba saga and the succession at the end of David’s life. The book of Samuel does not state that Nathan was present at the events he narrates in Brooks’s account, or even knew the people he quotes. But Nathan is a reasonable choice to see the many sides of David: lover, warrior, poet, musician, murderer, penitent, leader, father, son, king. The king’s protean personality comes through in the biblical story. Brooks tries to flesh it out, with the inevitable loss of the Bible’s cryptic power but with a gain of fully orchestrated scenes that, in the Bible, are single notes. When describing [David’s son] Amnon’s rape of [his sister] Tamar, for example, Brooks forces the reader to encounter the full depravity and cruelty of the event.

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.