In an in-depth analysis of the Jewish state’s “precarious situation”—written before the COVID-19 epidemic and the country’s 2020 election, and published before a governing coalition was formed—Elliot Jager examines a wide variety of dangers: a powerful and aggressive Iran, a seeming bipartisan U.S. commitment to withdrawal from the Middle East, growing anti-Israel sentiment on the American left, and an increasingly apathetic Diaspora. But he is most concerned about the “corrosive tribalism and the loss of a binding ethos” among Israelis:

In biblical times, this sort of unraveling appeared after King Solomon’s death (ca. 933 BCE), with the breakup of his kingdom into Judah and Israel [a division that continued] until Israel’s fall in 722 BCE and Judah’s in 586 BCE; and later in the lead-up to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

The devastating effects of tribalism have been a motif throughout Jewish history. Still, the ancient Israelite tribes shared a meta-identity. Over the ages, the Jewish people weathered the storms of disunity, fragmentation, and factionalism that buffeted their civilization because they all embraced—whether as sacred history or foundational myth—the Abrahamic covenant that established the contractual relationship between the God of Israel, the people of Israel, and the Land of Israel.

Bizarrely, Israel is a house divided by design. To enter first grade, Israeli parents register their children in one of four distinct educational systems: secular Zionist, national-religious Zionist, non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox, and Arab. For much of Israel’s history, the overwhelming majority of Jewish children attended either secular or national-religious [public] schools. [Now only 53 percent do so.] These numbers portend the demise of the country’s tolerantly liberal Zionist character.

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.