In his book The God Delusion, the evolutionary biologist and New Atheist polemicist Richard Dawkins proclaims that the commandment in Leviticus 19:18 to “love your neighbor as yourself” originally meant “only ‘love another Jew.’” Not so, argues the Bible scholar Richard Elliott Friedman, mustering significant contextual and linguistic evidence:

[First], the text already directs Jews/Israelites to love foreigners: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). What [then] would be the point of saying to love only Jews—and in the very same chapter! So who is our “neighbor”?

The Hebrew term here for “neighbor” is re’a. The first occurrence of re’a in the Torah is in the story of the tower of Babel (Genesis 11:3), the Bible’s story of the origin of different nations and languages. The term refers to every human, without any distinctions by group. . . [T]he next occurrence of the word [is] in the story of [Jacob’s son] Judah and [his daughter-in-law] Tamar. Judah has a re’a named Hirah the Adullamite (Genesis 38:12, 20). Hirah is a Canaanite, . . .  from the then-Canaanite city of Adullam. He cannot be a member of Judah’s clan because, at this point in the story, that clan, the Israelites, consists only of Jacob and his children and any grandchildren.

In the Exodus story the word appears in both the masculine and feminine, [when] Moses instructs the Israelites to ask their Egyptian neighbors for silver and gold items before they leave Egypt (Exodus 11:2): “each man will ask of his neighbor and each woman of her neighbor . . .”. The word there refers precisely to non-Israelites. . . .

In short, the word re’a is used to refer to an Israelite, a Canaanite, an Egyptian, or to everyone on earth.

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.