Even those who profess not to believe in the divine or the supernatural, writes Peter Berger, can sometimes find themselves confronted by a feeling that something beyond the realm of rational explanation is taking place. As Berger puts it, these sensations occupy a spectrum that includes “what I feel when I first hear the strange noise in the attic, when I hear it every midnight accompanied by Gregorian chanting, and when an angel appears in my bedroom and addresses me in sonorous Latin.” He goes on to describe the “distinctive mix of fascination and fear” that is part and parcel of religiosity, and an experience of his own:

[My wife and I] were living in Brooklyn, and often had to drive to and from LaGuardia airport on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The route goes through Williamsburg, which has one of the densest concentrations of ḥasidic Jews in the country. A number of bridges crosses the BQE. . . . One day I was driving home from having dropped someone at LaGuardia [Airport]. There was a strong wind. Suddenly a large, typically ḥasidic hat flew off one of the bridges and landed right in front of my car. It was a shtrayml, a velvet and fur concoction imitating the headgear of Renaissance Polish noblemen (it can be ordered online for about $600).

My options speeded in my head. It would have been very dangerous to brake suddenly at the speed I was going. I would have braked for a person, but surely not for a hat! When I arrived at home, I said to my wife: “Something very strange happened just now—I drove over a ḥasidic hat!” A few weeks later, a statistically improbable event: the scene repeated itself, same spot on the BQE, same type of hat. I drove over that one, too. I was scheduled to give some lectures in Jerusalem. I had the eerie thought that a third hat was waiting for me there.

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.