Among the earliest leaders of Zionism were several rabbis who went on to become some of Theodor Herzl’s most dedicated supporters. They eschewed the talk of creating “a new Jew” or revolutionizing Judaism that came from some Zionist thinkers, seeing such an approach as a threat to Orthodoxy. Instead, they saw the movement in practical terms as a way of ensuring the Jews’ physical survival. But this all changed with Abraham Isaac Kook, an Orthodox thinker who argued that Zionism was part of the divine plan and who laid out a vision of the rejuvenation of Judaism. Micah Goodman explains these ideas, how Kook’s ideology rose to prominence in the 1970s, and the threat to these ideas posed by the 2005 disengagement from Gaza. (Video, 70 minutes. Audio is available for streaming and download at the link below.)

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.