Considering current debates over gay marriage, abortion, and other issues where religion and politics intersect, Peter Berger looks for ways to avoid or defuse confrontation between religiously traditional and secular Americans in the public sphere. He writes:

I think that the only practical as well as morally acceptable formula is some degree of separation between the state and religion. There are different forms of this: British, American, French, German, Dutch. In all of these, the state (de-facto if not de-jure) is religiously neutral and presides benevolently over the pluralistic cacophony. This presupposes a secular space in which people of different faiths can peacefully interact. Important point: acceptance of the secular space (and a secular discourse to go with it, such as religiously neutral law) is not the same as secularism, which is the project of banning religion from public life. Put differently: the U.S. Constitution is not a Jacobin manifesto.

Even under the aforementioned separation formula, there must be some shared values among all of the communities or the society will either lapse into conflict or fall apart before outside aggression. In the current German debate over the integration of immigrants, the concept of Leitkultur (“lead culture”) refers to such a shared value system. This has a clear implication: there must be the shared secular discourse, supported by all communities, albeit for different reasons. Thus the first lapidary sentence of the 1949 German (then West German) constitution—“the dignity of man is inviolate”—was and is understood by Christians in terms of man in the image of God. But it can be and is being understood by people of another or no faith in terms of other conceptions of human dignity.

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.