Following a verbal attack on ultra-Orthodox Jews by a Soviet-born politician, Israel’s Sephardi chief rabbi, Yitzḥak Yosef, described immigrants from the former Soviet Union as “religion-hating Gentiles.” A recording of this and similar impolitic remarks was then circulated in the press, sparking controversy. Such comments don’t become a public figure, and have a corrosive effect on public discourse in the Jewish state, argues Jonathan Tobin, but they have an even worse effect overseas:

American Jews who look on Israel’s internecine warfare . . . with horror don’t generally realize that these disputes are fundamentally political rather than spiritual. At stake is not so much the legitimacy of different approaches to Judaism as an issue of power and the ability to dispense money to support religious and educational institutions. And all of that is on top of the issue of the exemptions the Ḥaredim get from the mandatory military service that other Israelis perform.

The real pity . . . is that [Rabbi Yosef referred to a] real problem that requires leadership from him and other religious leaders. It’s true that many Russian immigrants in Israel do not qualify as Jewish under religious law; however, the majority of them came to Israel to be Jews and have made an enormous contribution to the country, with their children serving in the Israel Defense Forces. Yet rather than ease their conversions, the rabbinate has placed obstacles in front of them. While it claims to be defending religious principles, . . . the rabbinate is seeking to defend its power rather than to do what is in the interests of the Jewish state and people.

But as angry as Israelis become because of provocations such as those provided by Yosef, at least they can put them in a political context that makes it understandable, if not justifiable. But from the outside, it can seem like an incomprehensible form of religious warfare rooted in contempt for other Jews.

This wasn’t the first (nor will it be the last) time a member of Israel’s chief rabbinate says something appalling. But it’s high time that senior religious leaders began to think more about their obligations to the entire Jewish people, including those who don’t necessarily share their beliefs, and about the way they are alienating many from Judaism.

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.