In 1955, the Yiddish author Isaac Bashevis Singer traveled for the first time to the Land of Israel, sending a series of dispatches back to New York for publication in the Yiddish Forward. In them, Singer, although never a Zionist, displays a great deal of passion for the Holy Land and sympathy for the fledgling state. David Stromberg comments:

Singer’s peculiar perspective . . . gives his writing from Israel its unique tone. It is always concerned with the big picture yet remains focused on the small picture. This is evident from the first moments of his trip, even while he was still on the ship. “I think about [the medieval philosopher-poet] Rabbi Judah Halevi and the sacrifices he made to set his eyes on the Holy Land,” he writes while the ship sails from France to Italy. “I think about the first pioneers, the first builders of the new yishuv. . . . How is it that there’s no trace of any of this on this ship? Are Jews no longer devoted with heart and soul to the idea of the Land of Israel?”

Singer is looking for proof of the spiritual greatness that the Land of Israel represents, and he wants to see it in the people on board with him—but he soon comes to understand that Israel is not a place of imagination, it’s a place that actually exists. “No, things are not all that bad,” he writes. “The fire is there, but is hidden. . . . The Land of Israel has become a reality, part of everyday life.” . . .

In his writing on Israel, Singer also constantly contemplates religious history and personal experience. In this spirit, he writes: “Ahavat Yisrael, loving fellow Jews . . . has a mystical significance.” Singer cannot avoid associating the place with his own religious education as a child—being a Jew in Israel also means, for him, being constantly in touch with the myriad of Jewish texts he has internalized. . . . Looking out from the balcony of a hotel in Safed a few days later, likely at Mount Meron, he writes: “This is not a mountain for tourists, or runaway fugitives, but for kabbalists, who made their accounting with our little world. There, through those mountains, one can cross from this world into the world to come.” . . .

The land as a whole has a strong effect on Singer, but his trip to Safed, as someone raised on the Kabbalah, made an especially strong impression. “I can say that here, for the first time, I gave myself over to the sense that I was in the Land of Israel.” These are moments when Singer’s sense of criticism, doubt, heresy, intellectuality, and all the other complex impulses that find their way into his fiction takes second place to a deep sense of piety and faith. This is no less powerful in his [fiction], where his characters achieve it rarely or partially, and, even when they do, with great difficulty.

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.