Just before the revelation at Sinai, God instructs Moses to tell the Israelites, “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bear you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself” (Exodus 19:4). Except, argues Natan Slifkin, it is likely that the bird mentioned here is not an eagle at all—as nearly every translation has it—but a vulture, most likely the griffon vulture. This reading puts the verse in a new perspective:

If referring to a griffon vulture, [this verse, along with Deuteronomy 32:11, which contains a similar image], shows that the vulture is regarded by the Torah very differently from how it is perceived in contemporary Western culture. While people today view the vulture in a negative light, the Torah presents it as an example of a loving and caring parent. [This attitude in fact reflects] the vulture’s parenting process. Female griffon vultures usually lay one egg, which both parents incubate for an unusually long period of around seven weeks until it hatches. The young are slow to develop and do not leave the nest until three or four months of age. The long devotion of the vulture to its young symbolizes God’s deep dedication to the Jewish people.

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.