In 1659, three years after Jews had been allowed to return to England, the famed diarist Samuel Pepys visited a London synagogue to attend a memorial service. He returned four years later and—not realizing it was the holiday of Simḥat Torah—was shocked by the wild celebration he encountered. While Pepys would not have witnessed such rejoicing on any other day of the year, Jonathan Sacks argues that Judaism ranks joy, when properly understood, as the most spiritually profound human feeling, and identifies this as a key message of the book of Deuteronomy:

The root s-m-ḥ [meaning “to rejoice”] appears once each in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, but twelve times in Deuteronomy, seven of them in [this week’s Torah reading of Re’eh]. What Moses says again and again is that joy is what we should feel in the land of Israel, the land given to us by God, the place to which the whole of Jewish life since the days of Abraham and Sarah has been a journey. . . .

The biblical word for “happy,” ashrey, is the first word of the book of Psalms and a key word of our daily prayers. But far more often, the Hebrew Bible speaks about simḥah, joy—and they are different things. Happiness is something you can feel alone, but joy, in the Tanakh, is something you share with others. . . .

[Søren] Kierkegaard once wrote: “It takes moral courage to grieve. It takes religious courage to rejoice.” I believe that with all my heart. So I am moved by the way Jews, who know what it is to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, still see joy as the supreme religious emotion.

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.