Yossi Klein Halevi discusses the impact of the 1967 war on Israeli society, recent shifts in Israeli politics, and his own memories from a half-century ago. (Interview by Calev Ben-Dor.)

My most primal memory was in the latter part of May 1967, watching the news with my father, a Holocaust survivor from Hungary who constantly carried that experience with him. We saw crowds of demonstrators chanting “death to Israel” and waving banners imprinted with skulls and cross-bones, which, as a fourteen-year-old boy, made a very deep impression on me. Both my father and I had this same dread that some version of the Holocaust was about to re-occur. And that feeling was repeated across the Jewish world, from Moscow to Tel Aviv. . . .

[The dread] of May 1967 was followed by the victory in June 1967. So there was an emotional trajectory from relief when we realized that Israel was not going to be destroyed, to joy and pride at the defeat of our enemies, and finally ecstasy—even a kind of religious ecstasy for many Jews—at the reversal: from destruction to redemption. It was a re-enactment, [in a sense, of the story] of Purim—the reversal of a genocidal threat, [with] the evil Haman hanging on the gallows that were intended for [the heroic] Mordechai. The euphoria was a combination of realizing we had just witnessed the greatest military victory in Jewish history as well as the restoration of those parts of the land of our past that had been denied to us.

Before the Six-Day War, Israel didn’t possess a single significant Jewish holy site. Thus, in some way, the state had been emptied of its religious content, of its soul. After the war we experienced the return to the Western Wall, to the tombs of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs in Hebron, and to Rachel’s tomb near Bethlehem as a restoration of everything that had been taken from us. My parents’ generation had no access to their own ancestral graves—either because they were forced to leave them behind (as was the case for Jews from the Arab world) or because they didn’t even exist (in the case of many Holocaust survivors). So to return to the graves of the first Jews was some kind of compensation for everything that had been denied for generations.

I remember powerful but conflicting emotions converging. Not only sitting with my father in anguish about the possibility of another Holocaust, but also standing with my father at the Western Wall and seeing him become a religious Jew again. After World War II he had stopped praying, yet after the Six-Day War he felt he could forgive God, which reflects a very Jewish way of navigating one’s relationship with God. My father never stopped believing in God but didn’t think He deserved the prayers of the Jewish people. Yet at the Western Wall my father made his peace with God, and became a devout Jew. What happened to my father also played out in the Jewish people.

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.