In 1884—twelve years before Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State, and thirteen before the First Zionist Congress—the Russian rabbi Shmuel Mohilever joined the secular Jewish physician Leon Pinsker in founding the Ḥibat Tsiyon, an organization dedicated to building a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine. But it was Mohilever’s disciple, Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, who laid the foundations for religious Zionism as it is known today. Channa Lockshin Bob describes Reines’s thought in light of newly discovered unpublished manuscripts:

Rabbi Reines brought together the sacred and the profane in many areas of his life. He founded a yeshiva that combined traditional talmudic study with secular subjects, an innovation at the time. His scholarship combined talmudic virtuosity with broad interests including mathematics, philosophy, and logic. So he was perfectly cut out to initiate close cooperation between traditional Judaism and secular Zionism.

Rabbi Reines first got involved in the Zionist movement in 1899, when he participated and spoke at the Third Zionist Congress in Basel. In the coming years he continued to participate in Zionist Congresses. He met Herzl and corresponded with him until Herzl’s death in 1904. In 1902 Rabbi Reines founded the Mizrahi movement—a religious faction within the Zionist movement—with Herzl’s support.

Reines’s lectures from the years 1908 to 1911 are collected in a manuscript titled Yalkut Arakhim. . . . [One] of these lectures, [delivered on the anniversary of Herzl’s death], examines the topic of immortality. Surprisingly, Reines presents a fairly [rationalistic] view of life after death: “When we see that even after one’s death, his achievements are recognized, that is a sign of his immortality.” Later in the lecture, he adds that “those whose help is recognized even after their death have been made to be like God.” The last words of the speech are: “All signs of mourning are signs of immortality.”

Could it be that Reines’s final sentence about signs of mourning is not only a general statement, but also a reference to himself, as he continues to mourn the loss of Herzl even years after his passing?

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.