In One Child, Sarah Conly, a professor of philosophy, argues that having two or more children is an immoral indulgence. Heather Wilhelm writes in her review:

The health of humanity is not the book’s central operative metric. Rather, environmental health—the fabled steady state of an innocent, benevolent Planet Earth, which is being corrupted by the “parasites” that dwell upon it—is. Thus, we come to Conly’s . . . conclusion: human beings have a right only to a “minimally decent life” and, as a corollary, a right to having only one child. . . .

Having multiple children, Conly argues, “is not so basic an interest as the interest in sustenance, or health, or social connections.” Having one child, she writes, serves all the potential purposes of procreating in the first place: equality (“being treated as just as worthy as others to reproduce”), creating a family life (albeit without siblings, which she equates to “expensive toys”), and the simple, caveman-like duty of passing along one’s genes. . . .

Children, in this view, are tools; they are ours to own and manipulate, and exist solely for our gratification. This distressing outlook—a sort of raw materialism as applied to human life—flows throughout the book. If your one allotted child dies, Conly blithely notes, you can certainly have another one; the answer is less clear, unfortunately, if your child is disabled or as “good as dead.” . . .

Beyond this, at the heart of One Child, there’s a genuine befuddlement as to what people are actually for. . . . Humanity should continue, she generously concedes, but it’s quite obvious that she has no idea why. Understanding why would require deep thoughts, and deep thoughts have no place here.

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.