A new museum in Israel strives to spread knowledge about the wildlife that once existed in the land and is discussed in the Bible. Orit Arfa writes:

One of the goals of the new museum is to bring Jews back in touch with biblical wildlife, a subject ignored by the people of Israel as they were exiled from the land. . . . But the land of Israel, located at the nexus of Europe, Asia, and Africa, actually occupies a very special place from a zoogeographic perspective. . . .

“It’s our connection to historical Israel,” [says the museum’s director, Natan] Slifkin. “Every nation, every culture, has animals that are part of that culture—animals that appear in its cultural texts and traditions. . . . For the native Americans, it’s the buffalo and wolf. For the aboriginals of Australia, it’s the kangaroo and emu. . . . The people of Israel have lions, leopards, bears, vultures, crocodiles, and hippos. These are not animals from the shtetls of Europe.”

But the animals that figure prominently in the Torah have largely been exiled or killed off, mostly due to deforestation and Roman-era hunting. The last bear in Israel was seen in Nahal Ammud, in the Galilee region, in 1917. Crocodiles lived in a place called Nahal Taninim (Crocodile Creek) until the early 20th century. Today, exactly four leopards walk the Negev desert.

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.