On the holiday of Simḥat Torah (which fell on Monday in Israel and Tuesday in the Diaspora) the annual cycle of readings from the Pentateuch is concluded with the end of Deuteronomy. Here God instructs Moses to survey the land of Israel from a mountain vantage point, but forbids him from entering. This is generally understood as punishment of the Israelites’ dying leader, but James A. Diamond wonders whether it is really something else:

Should Moses have extended his leadership tenure and guided the people into the land, he would have been faced with . . . more of the same anguish and suffering he had experienced up until this point. It would surely have entailed the wrangling, the complaints, the jealousy, and the power struggles that accompany the burdens of state- building. . . . God does not invite Moses up the mountain to deny him entry into the Promised Land (“I have let you see it with your own eyes, But you shall not cross there”), but rather to preempt the pain of doing so, while assuring him that his vision will inevitably become a reality. The verse reads better as “I have let you see it with your own eyes, and there you need not cross.”

Moses is thus spared being mired in the partisan machinations that—as the historical record of the books of Joshua, [Judges, Samuel, and] Kings (let alone the contemporary history of the modern Jewish state!) evidence—would certainly have ensued. His record then of autonomy and initiative, even in the face of divine obstinacy, is preserved and remains untarnished by the political intrigue that would have inevitably consumed him to the very end.

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.