Long the sole Gentile among Sigmund Freud’s disciples, Carl Jung eventually came to believe that religion had an irreplaceable role to play in the life of the psychologically healthy individual, as Andrew Ladd writes:

Religious readers will appreciate the general ideas of Jung’s psychology that inspire a personal spiritual awareness. . . . Unlike Freud, who explained religious belief as a holdover from infant experience, Jung explored psychology with an unshakable conviction in the existence of God. . . .

We find in numerous passages that Jung recognized the therapeutic value of faith. The path of knowing oneself in a psychological sense must accompany an understanding of one’s relation to God. . . .

Because Jung wrote about myth and considered all religions worthy of study and respect, many have wrongly assumed that he interpreted religion as myth in the sense that it is deluded belief, something childish and meant only for the unthinking masses. Just the reverse is true. Not only did Jung stress the importance of belief; he thought religion held the truths that made belief possible.

Indeed, Jung thought that the worst condition for the modern man was his abandonment of [organized religion]. . . . According to Jung, one cannot simply conjure up one’s own religion, as we see so often in the narcissistic culture of our day. On the contrary, religion curbs that very impulse.

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.