In her recent book, What’s Divine about Divine Law, Christine Hayes examines how Jews in antiquity thought about the laws of the Torah. Many, especially those influenced by Greco-Roman thinking, considered halakhah divine because of its nature or characteristics; others saw it as divine simply because it was commanded by God. (This division, she remarks, corresponds neatly to the one in modern legal theory between those who believe in positive law and those who believe in natural law.) According to Hayes, many Greek-speaking Jews—including the Alexandrian philosopher Philo and the apostle Paul—found the two competing notions to be disturbingly dissonant, but the talmudic rabbis, for their part, tended toward a conception of law that transcended the distinction between them. (Interview by Joseph Ryan Kelly. Audio, 52 minutes.)

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.