In her short literary career, begun at age thirty-nine and ending with her death at fifty-seven in 2005, Batya Gur wrote six bestselling crime novels that established her as Israel’s leading practitioner of the genre. A former high-school teacher, Gur claimed to have modeled her books’ hero, an academic-turned-detective named Michael Ohayon, on herself. Praising her works, which have been translated into several languages, Sean Cooper examines what makes them especially Israeli:

In each of the six books, Gur dispatches Ohayon into a tightknit, insular community where the murder of one of their own, and with one or more of their own somehow implicated in the death, threatens to collapse the foundation of that community. . . . Gur’s communities are stand-ins for Israeli society writ large, whether a kibbutz, chamber orchestra, university literature department, or a psychoanalytic teaching institute.

Gur emerged with her bestseller debut, in 1988, when detective fiction written in Hebrew had been all but dormant for five decades. As a consumer product for popular entertainment, the crime fiction of the 1930s was published in small books on cheap paper intended to be discarded, like a periodical, after it was read. Dismissed in their day by some critics as a frivolous abasement of the language, these disposable tomes were supported by others as an effective means of promoting basic Hebrew literacy. The enterprise did not sustain itself much past a decade, and save for the occasional children’s book, readers of crime fiction had to turn to translations of English works to get their fix.

Unlike [the celebrated English-language crime novelist] Ross Macdonald’s free-floating, solitary Lew Archer, Gur’s detective, Ohayon, is an institution man, respectful of his own, of others, striving for promotions, deferential to leaders, occasionally sentimental, with a firm but not insoluble belief in the sanctity of a group’s code of conduct and declared intentions. When a subordinate chafes at judicial procedures that slow up their investigation, Ohayon snaps back, “Don’t knock it. . . . You want to live in a place like Argentina? It’s a price we have to pay.”

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.