Moses Maimonides, citing the Talmud, suggests changing one’s name as a way of repenting for sin. It is a measure also traditionally taken by the gravely ill. Benjamin Corn, an oncologist who works in Israel, estimates that some 15 percent of his patients change their names. He writes:

For some, their name change manifests Maimonides’ cryptic, if not mystical, remark [that, after a name change, one ceases to be] the same person who committed previous (sinful) actions. Another explanation goes like this: as Scripture equates disease (and even death) with punishment for transgressions, if the afflicted changes his name, then he is no longer that person and therefore cannot be the object of God’s retribution. Yet, even among my religious patients—some even conduct a formal name-change ceremony in the hospital chapel—only a minority maintains such a fundamentalist view. What’s more, at our cancer center, I’ve observed that name changes are undertaken by equal percentages of religious and secular patients; there must be another reason.

When I first became aware of this name-changing phenomenon, I concluded that it must be a sign of desperate fear. But I have come to appreciate that while the ritual may, on occasion, be motivated by fear, it is actually far more often a statement about hope—a hope to find a better day and to affirm faith in the human ability to re-invent oneself in the face of hardship. As a result, name change, it now seems to me, is less about a new name and more about the opportunity for change.

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.