Today is the first day of the Hebrew month of Marḥeshvan, often known simply as Ḥeshvan. While its name, like that of the other months on the Jewish calendar, is Babylonian in origin, a popular folk etymology understands it to mean “bitter Ḥeshvan” (from the Hebrew mar, meaning bitter)—a testament to the fact that it contains no holidays. A more playful variant takes advantage of the fact that mar can also be an honorific, in modern Hebrew the equivalent of “mister.” In fact, explains Shlomo Zuckier, Marḥeshvan derives from maraḥ shevan, meaning “the eight month,” which it is if you count from the spring month of Nissan as the Bible and ancient Jewish sources often do:

[The 13th-century rabbi Moses] Naḥmanides expresses a certain discomfort with counting months based on names acquired in exile rather than the earlier biblical practice of simply numbering them, starting from [Nissan], the month of the exodus from Egypt. He justifies the current practice by arguing that using the Babylonian names recalls and appreciates God’s returning the Jewish people to Israel following the Babylonian exile. Some religious Zionists have even proposed reverting to counting from the exodus, both for months and for years.

In a sense, then, Marḥeshvan might be seen as the ultimate month name, in that it manages both to retain the Babylonian name and to count from the month of the exodus from Egypt.

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.