By J.R.R. Tolkien’s own admission, the dwarves are the group in his novels most similar to Jews, and in constructing their language he even drew upon Semitic models. Meir Soloveichik explores Tolkien’s attitudes toward Jews, his friendship with the Jewish historian Cecil Roth, the story of The Hobbit’s translation into Hebrew, and what, if anything, these “short, bearded beings exiled from their homeland, who have dreamed forever of returning” can teach actual Jews about their own experience:

According to the Bible, [Moses told the Israelites], “Not because of your size did God love you, for ye are the smallest of the nations.” We are, you might say, dwarfed by other peoples. And we are, until this day, chosen by God.

At the end of The Hobbit, the dwarves have returned to their mountain, the throne of the dwarf kingdom has been reestablished, and [the wizard] Gandalf tells Bilbo, [the unlikely hero who aids the dwarves in their quest to regain their homeland], of the glory that now surrounds the miraculous mountaintop. Bilbo replies: “Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!” . . .

Tolkien was rather instructive here. For the story of the Jews is about a little people who today, and throughout time, have helped bring prophecy about. Yet, all too often, they doubt [prophecy] all the more, refusing to accept that to be a Jew means to be a part of the most miraculous story that could ever be told, a story that is not yet over.

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.