In 1992, Israel passed its Basic Law on human dignity and liberty, which guarantees to its citizens certain protections roughly equivalent to those found in the American Bill of Rights. Aharon Barak, then a justice of Israel’s supreme court—and soon thereafter its president—argued at the time that this law gave the high court broad authority to strike down laws that in any way violated “human dignity,” a concept Barak believed should be determined by the values of the “enlightened community.” After seeing the court’s sweeping use of this theory, and the power arrogated by its attendant bureaucracy, some Israelis began to argue that the country needed a Basic Law that would serve as a counterweight and enshrine the country’s Jewish character as an inviolate constitutional principle. The result, following seven years of parliamentary wrangling, was the Basic Law the Knesset passed last week, defining Israel as “the nation state of the Jewish people.” In conversation with Jonathan Silver, Eugene Kontorovich explains why this law is necessary, and rebuts some arguments made by its critics. (Audio, 25 minutes. Options for download and streaming are available 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.