In the book of Genesis, after punishing him for murdering Abel, God places an unspecified mark on Cain to protect him from harm. Eva Mroczek notes some of the varying interpretations of this passage:

The Bible connects the mark with divine protection, but some interpreters link it with the curse that God placed upon Cain, imagining it as a badge of shame. One suggestion in a Jewish midrash, for example, is that Cain was punished with leprosy. . . .

The mark of Cain has also been interpreted in anti-Semitic ways. Some Christian interpreters saw Cain as the prototype of the Jewish people (although, according to the biblical genealogy in Genesis 5, Jews are not Cain’s descendants—nor, for that matter, is anyone else, as it was Noah’s family, descended from Seth, who survived the flood). Saint Augustine (354–430) connected the “mark of Cain” to the observance of Jewish law: the Jews “never lost the sign of their law, by which they are distinguished from all other nations and peoples,” whereas another Christian theologian, Isidore of Seville (560–636), linked it more precisely with circumcision. Extrapolating from these motifs, other Christian readers imagined Cain according to offensive stereotypes of Jews—with a hooked nose or horns, distinct in appearance and condemned to endless wandering. . . .

But other interpreters did read the mark as something protective. The same midrash that mentions leprosy also suggests a range of other possibilities: for instance, it relates that Cain grew a horn, which is both a mark of identity and a defensive weapon. This same text also speculates that God gave Cain a dog as the “mark.” Though dogs tend to be portrayed negatively in classical Jewish sources, the dog might be a sign both of stigma and of protection from attackers.

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.