Although the prophet Samuel declares that “the Glory of Israel does not lie,” most medieval Christian theologians, going back to Augustine, believed that although God would not (or could not) tell outright lies, He did deceive—for instance, in telling Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. Only with the Scientific Revolution, argues Dallas G. Denery II, did philosophers begin to argue otherwise, and they did so in order to bolster not their religious beliefs but their rationalist ones:

[T]he commitment of the Scientific Revolution to rational causes for all events, even exceptional or seemingly anomalous ones, robbed God of the power to deceive. Losing the power to deceive, God lost the power to speak, to interfere and interact with the world. From the perspective of scientists this was almost necessary, interested as they were in a stable and constant world reducible to mathematical equations and inviolable principles. God became the source of universal order at the cost of no longer having anything much to do with the universe.

This change brought real consequences. More and more, scientists came to imagine the entire universe as a vast machine, a complex mechanism akin to a clock. God, having designed and created it, wound it up, then stepped back and let it run its course.

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.