In Neighboring Faiths, a recently published collection of essays, the historian David Nirenberg explores the relationship among the three religions during the Middle Ages. Alex Novikoff writes in his review:

Medieval Iberia has often been held up as a mirror to our own society, and for quite understandable reasons. For some, this bygone era represents a beacon of interfaith tolerance and cultural exchange of the sort we might learn from today. Convivencia (“living together”) has long been the descriptive term of choice, a word that over the years has achieved a sort of sublime meaninglessness. . . .

For others, medieval Iberia is best seen as a harsh and unrelenting mill that, through the grating and grinding of competing cultures and hostile takeovers, churned out some of the worst templates of religious intolerance: jihad and crusade, forced conversions, torture and inquisition, racial exclusion, wholesale expulsions, and more. . . . Yet other scholars . . . favor a more nuanced middle ground of [simultaneous] conflict and coexistence. . . . In this stimulating and deeply learned collection of essays . . . David Nirenberg reaffirms his mastery as an original and challenging expositor in this third category of historical interpreters.

Many who pick up this book will want to know whether Nirenberg has a special message to a modern audience bathed both in the gruesome stories of religiously inspired violence that flood our daily news feeds and in the seemingly endless discussions of the allegedly “medieval” behavior of modern fundamentalist groups. . . . By the close of the book I could not quite tell whether Nirenberg is pessimistic or optimistic about the future of our neighborly relations. . . . . He gently entreats his readers to draw their own conclusions from the terrain that has been mapped and the issues that have been raised. My own conclusion is one that [the poet] Robert Frost, I suspect, must have known all along: good fences don’t make good neighbors; good neighbors make good neighbors. The fences we build play a more ambiguous role.

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.