Set in 1977, the Amazon series Hunters, which debuts tomorrow, stars Al Pacino as Meyer Offerman, a Holocaust survivor turned millionaire who leads a team of highly skilled volunteers in pursuing ex-Nazis living in the U.S. “Each episode,” writes Kyle Smith in his review, “finds the hunters tracking down one Special Guest Nazi to administer ironic torture and, often, painful execution.” By loading the show with comic-book clichés (one character wields “a golden dagger of vengeance”) while catering to the demands of box-checking diversity, its writers have produced something neither entertaining nor intellectually satisfying:

The inclusiveness fetish . . . explains why a specifically Jewish revenge story gets diluted into meaninglessness by being embodied by a team of hunters that includes a kickboxing black single mom, an Asian-American Vietnam vet, and a snarky British nun. Also on the team of hunters are an alcoholic B-movie actor and a married couple of codebreaking alte kockers.

Why is Meyer operating outside the law and making himself and everyone on his team liable for murder charges? . . . Meyer is a noted philanthropist who is said to be able to pull the strings of politicians (and manages effortlessly to free an associate from police custody after he is caught with what appears to be several pounds of heroin). It beggars belief that he couldn’t find anyone in the justice system to hear his exhaustively documented evidence about the war criminals he keeps tracking down. Yet he dispenses with the niceties and takes care of business himself.

The series treats all such escapades not as moral tangles but instead as great escapist fun, with a silly comic-book tone. [It thus] trivializes real-life Nazi hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal. Moreover, the many attempts in Hunters to drape itself in solemnity (via such episode titles as “The Mourner’s Kaddish” and references to ancient Jewish codes of retribution) are undercut by relentlessly cutesy comedy notions such as introducing killers as though they were joining a candle-lighting ceremony at a bar mitzvah party or having stoned teens slip into a fantasy dance number (“Stayin’ Alive,” which as of the summer of 1977 hadn’t been released yet).

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.