In the summer of 1973, the Beatles’ “Let It Be,” which had been released three years prior, was a mainstay of Israeli radio, leading the songwriter Naomi Shemer—best known for her “Jerusalem of Gold”—to compose a Hebrew version, to be sung to the same tune. Then the Yom Kippur war broke out, and the song she had written no longer seemed appropriate, as Lahav Harkov writes:

Shemer changed the lyrics to a prayer expressing hope for the battles to end and for IDF soldiers to return home peacefully. . . . Shemer wrote the song for the singer Chava Alberstein, who had wanted to perform it at an event for pilots’ wives. . . .

At first, [Shemer] kept the Beatles’ tune, but her husband, Mordechai Horowitz, on a reprieve from fighting in the war, said: “I won’t let you waste this song on a foreign tune. This is a Jewish war, and you should give it a Jewish tune.” . . .

That day, Shemer was asked to perform on television, and she came up with an original tune for the song in the car on the way to the studio, a tune that she described as [capturing] “the sigh and distress of the war.” The song was broadcast the next day, and a day after that, Alberstein performed it on Army Radio. Shemer’s “Let It Be” became the unofficial song of the Yom Kippur War, played and sung by soldiers on duty.

[According to Shemer], the then-IDF chief of staff David Elazar first heard the song after the war ended, and it made him cry.

A video of Shemer performing the song—whose title, Lu y’hi, means “may it be”—can be found at the link below. Lyrics in Hebrew and in English translation can be found here.

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.