On Tuesday, the funeral of a ḥasidic rabbi in Brooklyn attracted a large crowd and, despite the efforts of its organizers—in coordination with municipal authorities—the police eventually dispersed the crowd. The same evening, New York City’s Mayor Bill de Blasio made the following announcement over Twitter, “My message to the Jewish community, and all communities, is this simple: the time for warnings has passed. I have instructed the [New York Police Department] to proceed immediately to summons or even arrest those who gather in large groups. This is about stopping this disease and saving lives. Period.”

John Podhoretz, addressing de Blasio directly, writes:

[L]ike moral ciphers from time immemorial, you decided to seek your jollies by attacking Jews.

There’s no way to read your tweet from Tuesday night in an exculpatory fashion. . . . Your own police department helped arrange street closures for the funeral with the Satmar Ḥasidim. People came out to show their respects to the dead. They were wearing masks. Yes, they showed up in greater numbers than was safe. That is clear. But the very same police officers who set up the pylons closing the streets to car traffic could have limited the numbers, the way they do on New Year’s Eve around Times Square.

What we saw here was therefore a failure of authority. Your authority. Not a failure of “the Jewish community.” And yet, when you announced you were going to the site personally to address this outrage, what you saw were: bad Jews.

Under your watch, as mayor, there has been an anti-Jewish crime wave in this city. Last year alone, anti-Semitic hate crimes rose 29 percent, prominently featuring the random sucker-punch attacks we’ve all seen on video. After remaining shockingly silent about them for a very long time, you finally spoke out in December 2019. In appointing a task force to look into the violent assaults on Jews in the five boroughs, you said, “An attack on the Jewish community is an attack on all New Yorkers.”

Maybe you should appoint a task force to investigate yourself.

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.