Fifty years ago, the Catholic Church released an official statement, Nostra Aetate, delineating its attitudes toward non-Christian religions. Most significantly, Nostra Aetate condemned anti-Semitism and rejected previous Christian teachings that encouraged it. Jonathan Sacks sees it as a model for all religious leaders today to heed and emulate:

Religiously motivated violence has brought chaos and destruction to great swaths of the Middle East [as well as] parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. Christians are suffering the religious equivalent of ethnic cleansing in countries where they have been a presence for centuries. Peaceful Islam is being subverted by radical jihadists, leading to barbarism and slaughter, often of other Muslims, on an ever-widening scale. Meanwhile anti-Semitism has returned in full force within living memory of the Holocaust. . . .

We need, if anything, another and larger Nostra Aetate, binding together the great world religions in a covenant of mutuality and responsibility. The freedom and respect we seek for our own faith we must be prepared to grant to others. We need a global coalition of respected religious leaders with the vision [Pope] John XXIII had in his day and the honesty to admit that much that is done in the name of faith is in fact a desecration of faith and a violation of its most sacred principles.

It took the Holocaust to bring about Nostra Aetate. What will it take now for religious leaders to stand together in opposition to the religiously motivated hatreds spreading like contagion through our interconnected world?

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.