In the mid-1930s, Erna Meyer, a Jewish physician recently arrived in the land of Israel from Nazi Germany, authored How to Cook in Palestine, the first such work to be published in the British Mandate. The book, written in Hebrew, English, and German, was geared to housewives raised in Europe who were unfamiliar with the local produce and climate and struggling to adjust to the harsh material conditions. Dana Kessler writes:

“We housewives must make an attempt to free our kitchens from European customs which are not applicable to Palestine. We should wholeheartedly stand in favor of healthy Palestine cooking,” writes Meyer, urging new Jewish immigrants to Palestine to shed their European identity and reinvent themselves according to the Zionist ideology. “We should foster these ideas not merely because we are compelled to do so, but because we realize that this will help us more than anything else in becoming acclimatized to our old-new homeland.” . . .

Meyer gives special attention in her book to local vegetables such as marrow (similar to zucchini), okra, and eggplant, giving us a glimpse into the roots of Israeli cuisine. Instead of liver, Meyer offers . . . a chopped eggplant dish, which tastes a lot like traditional Ashkenazi chopped liver. Eggplant “liver” was a big hit in the days of austerity, in which meat was scarce, and it can still be found in delis and supermarkets in Israel to this day.

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.