On July 8, notices circulated in Israeli ḥaredi communities warning that it was both dangerous and forbidden by halakhah to drink water between the hours of 2:00 and 3:00 PM. Natan Slifkin explains:

[The announcements] caught a lot of people by surprise. The reason given was even more surprising: that this hour is the transition point of the summer solstice, which, together with the winter solstice and the equinoxes, divides the year into four quarters. As such, it is a time when the angels change shifts, and while there is nobody on duty [between the end of one shift and the beginning of the next], the Angel of Death can poison the water.

Before you rush to dismiss this out of hand, you should also be aware that while this is not mentioned in the Talmud, it is mentioned by no less an authority than Rabbi Moses Isserles [a 16th-century Polish rabbi whose rulings are traditionally regarded as authoritative for Ashkenazi Jews], who notes that this is a “basic” custom that is a tradition from many great authorities. . . .

[But] this is a practice that pretty much nobody has cared about, or known about, for hundreds of years, [even within ultra-Orthodox communities]. . . . People who are resurrecting the prohibition against drinking water during the solstice are not actually afraid that it is dangerous. . . . These people just want to do what they think makes them [pious].

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.