A few decades ago, notes Einat Wilf, the security measures at Israel’s Ben-Gurion airport baffled and annoyed foreign visitors; nowadays, elaborate security procedures are used at airports worldwide, and Israel is admired for its efficient and effective system. So, too, Wilf argues, with Israel’s commitment to nationalism: once many in the West believed the Jewish state clung anomalously and foolishly to a dying idea; now the world could learn from its example:

From Asia to the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, it is becoming increasingly clear that faced with globalization, immigration, and economic uncertainty, people have a greater need for a specific sense of belonging to something, whether it is a tribe, a people, or a nation. This basic need of all peoples can be expressed in a variety of forms, from the benign to the mean-spirited, but when it is ignored and even denigrated, it is more likely to manifest itself in supremacist and racist ways.

Against this backdrop, Israel’s Jewish nationalism emerges as reasonably balanced: providing people with a sense of specific belonging to a people and a nation while addressing ongoing challenges of immigration, integration, and the existence of large minorities who possess, at best, ambivalent attitudes toward Jewish nationalism. Decades of dealing with these enormous challenges under the world’s magnifying glass while being subjected to scathing and often sinister criticism mean that, if anything, Israel and the Jewish people are positioned to provide a model of a relatively benign form of nationalism.

It is not that Israel does not exhibit distasteful expressions of nationalism; they are not cause for pride, but they can no longer be considered cause for specific shame. There is nothing in the Jewish need for a sense of tribal and national belonging that makes it inherently better or worse than that need among other peoples, tribes, and nations 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.