The exemption of churches, synagogues, and other religious organizations from taxation is a longstanding principle of American law that has recently come under attack. Richard W. Garnett defends the practice:

Instead of asking whether churches and religious organizations deserve to be tax-exempt, we should ask why governments should be able to tax them at all. Taxation, after all, involves interference by the state, and in a free society such interference needs to be justified. . . .

Many of the recent calls to tax churches rest on the premise that churches owe at least some of their resources to political authorities—to governments—who can decide whether or not to collect and use those resources for their own purposes. In this view, exempting churches from taxation is seen as somehow subsidizing religion. But it is a mistake to equate “not taxing” with “subsidizing,” even if in some sense the effect is the same. Governments do not refrain from taxing religious institutions merely because it is politically convenient or socially acceptable to support them. They do and should continue to refrain from taxing churches because their power over them is limited, because “church” and “state” are distinct, and because religious freedom is fundamentally important.

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.