The book of Leviticus, in its catalogue of forbidden unions, says nothing about marriage between uncles and nieces. The rabbis of the talmudic period allowed and even approved of such marriages, at least between a man and his sister’s daughter; they seem to have differed on the question of marriage between a man and his brother’s daughter, while agreeing that it was not forbidden by the Bible. Later, a small number of medieval rabbis moved to prohibit any uncle-niece marriage at all, and recent scholars have discovered ancient manuscript evidence that both Sadducees and the Qumran sect forbade such unions. Rudolph Klein explains:

[The 20th-century rabbi and academic scholar] Saul Lieberman argues that the talmudic rabbis classified marrying one’s niece as a positive deed specifically in order to counter the Sadducean view that marrying one’s niece is biblically forbidden. He notes it is the rabbis’ way to take things that are simply “allowed” by the Bible and encourage people to do them in order to undermine sectarian heretical views.

Interestingly, [the 14th-century rabbinic scholar] Ishtori ha-Parḥi notes that the Sadducees were not innovators in banning marriage to a niece; [he claims that] they adopted the prohibition from the Samaritans, who took the idea from the Arabs. Later, the Karaites also followed suit and outlawed uncle-niece marriage.

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.