Last week, the Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, David Lau, forcefully criticized Naftali Bennett—the Israeli minister of education and Diaspora affairs—for visiting a Conservative day school in New York. Shlomo Riskin, a prominent Israeli Orthodox rabbi, argues that this move was a symptom of Lau’s failure to understand his proper role:

[T]he chief rabbi of Israel ought to see himself as the shepherd of every single Jew, including everyone and excluding no one; his sensitive reach must extend to the most wayward no matter where he may have wandered. To this end [the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi], Abraham Isaac Kook, spent many Sabbaths in the most secular kibbutzim and moshavim, bringing his own food and without any chastising or even preaching. He merely embraced the kibbutzniks, sang with them, danced with them, and regaled them with stories. A chief rabbi especially must be, [in the words of the talmudic sage Hillel] “a disciple of Aaron; a lover of peace, a pursuer of peace, a lover of humanity, a person whose love will bring everyone close to Torah.”

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.