On the Israeli calendar, three days of national commemoration follow Passover in quick succession. Yom Hashoah falls on the 27th of Nissan, and Yom Hazikaron—the day of remembrance for Israeli soldiers—falls a week later on the 4th of Iyyar, followed by Independence on the next day. (In 2019 the dates correspond, respectively, to May 2, 8, and 9.) The Israeli poet Tzur Erlich describes this stretch of days in four compact rhymed verses, titled B’hefresh shel shavua (“A Week Apart”). Herewith, an English translation by Ehud Schwammenthal and Michael Doran; the Hebrew original is available at the link below.

Each year two memorials close in date,
A general reckoning to aid
What cost to us is a state,
And without, what price is paid.

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.