While praising Jonathan Sacks’s “brilliant” and “eloquent” Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, Shlomo Riskin nevertheless faults the author for arguing that “Abrahamic monotheism should be understood . . . as a profound social and theological critique of the politicization of religion.” Such a view, writes Riskin, goes too far, ignoring an important element of the biblical message and threatening to undercut the religious case for Zionism (free registration required):

As careful readers of the Hebrew Bible as different as the early-modern Protestant thinkers described by Eric Nelson in The Hebrew Republic and the [19th-century] head of famed Volozhin yeshiva, Naftali Zvi Yehudah Berlin, have argued, there is a biblical ideal of a constitutional nation-state which is integrally related to the Abrahamic vision. Indeed, only such a political enterprise can fulfill that vision of a monotheistic community devoted to compassionate righteousness and moral justice. It is the kingship of God that underwrites human freedom and justice, but these values must be enforced and defended by human beings. In short, Sacks seems uncomfortable with an Israel that actually succeeds in its Abrahamic mission of convincing the families of the earth to accept the moral and spiritual truths of monotheism. . . .

Religion may be able to survive without power, but it will be unable to redeem without power. Power may corrupt, and absolute power may corrupt absolutely, but powerlessness corrupts, too, for it necessitates accommodation with, and sometimes even surrender to, evil.

We [Jews] will never be able to fulfill our Abrahamic mandate to redeem the world if we remain powerless. This was the original mission of Israel, and the purpose for which we returned to Zion.

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.