Weighing in on a dispute between two modern interpreters of Chronicles, Peter Leithart argues that the book deliberately highlights similarities between Saul, the first Israelite king, and the wicked Ahaz, who ruled the kingdom of Judah many generations later. Each was succeeded by an archetypal good king: respectively, David and Hezekiah. And this isn’t the only internal parallel regarding Saul:

[Rudolph] Mosis . . . finds a contrast between Saul and Josiah with regard to the “word of the Lord.” Saul’s failure to guard the Lord’s word is one dimension of his transgression [“against the word of the Lord” which, according to Chronicles, brought about his demise], and King Josiah’s righteousness is evident in his insistence on following “the word of the Lord” (2 Chronicles 34:21). These are the only two places where the phrase “the word of the Lord” appears in Chronicles [in conjunction with the Hebrew word for “keep” or “guard.”] Josiah is the last to [follow God’s word], and Judah goes into exile because she rejects and mocks the prophets, the Lord’s messengers. The collapse of Saul’s house because of his transgression . . . foreshadows the complete collapse of exile.

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.