“There are no words,” was the comment Dara Horn heard most often in response to the recent slaughter in Pittsburgh. But, she writes, that’s not quite accurate:

[T]here are words for this, entire books full of words: the books the murdered people were reading at the hour of their deaths. News reports described these victims as praying, but Jewish prayer is not primarily personal or spontaneous. It is communal reading. Public recitations of ancient words, scripts compiled centuries ago and nearly identical in every synagogue in the world. A lot of those words are about exactly this. . . .

When Ruth Mallinger [of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life congregation] was ninety-seven, she and ten other Jews were murdered in their synagogue. There are words for this, too, a Hebrew phrase for 2,500 years’ worth of people murdered for being Jews: kiddush hashem, death in sanctification of God’s name.

[But], in the old stories, those outside the community rarely helped or cared; our ancestors’ consolation came only from one another and from God. But in this horrific week, perhaps our old words might mean something new, [as evidenced by the response of] Americans of every background who inspire more optimism than Jewish history allows. . . . As George Washington vowed in his 1790 letter to a Rhode Island synagogue, America shall be a place where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Those words aren’t his. They’re from the Hebrew prophet Micah, on the shelves of every synagogue in the world.

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.