Yesterday a nineteen-year-old Israeli yeshiva student named Dvir Sorek was murdered in what authorities are treating as an attack by Palestinian terrorists. He was on his way back to his yeshiva from a trip to Jerusalem where he had bought a book as a gift for one of his teachers when he was apparently taken and stabbed to death, his body left on a road leading to his home.

His father, Yoav Sorek, the editor of Hashiloach, an Israeli journal of ideas, and a friend and contributor to Mosaic, remembered his son as a boy with “light in his eyes,” reports the Times of Israel.

“Whoever didn’t know him missed out; he used to help the weak around him who were in need of a friend,” a tearful Yoav Sorek told reporters outside his home.

“Our Dvir was sweet,” Sorek . . . said of his nineteen-year-old son. “Two months ago he had a karate exam and he didn’t get a high grade because his teacher said he performs the movements well, but lacks ‘murder’ in his eyes. That’s right. He had light in his eyes. Now someone with murder in his eyes has taken him.

“We received a gift for almost nineteen years—for that gift we are grateful, we will carry the pain from now on,” he said.

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.