At the very end of this week’s Torah reading of Emor, we find a brief narrative passage (Leviticus 24:10-23) that seems oddly placed amid laws concerning holidays and sabbatical years and regulations pertaining to priests and the Tabernacle. The story involves a man, the son of an Israelite mother and an Egyptian father, who gets into a fistfight with “a certain Israelite” and then invokes God’s ineffable name in cursing his opponent. When Moses hears of this he has the son of the Egyptian father incarcerated and awaits divine instruction. God explains that the punishment for blasphemy is death by stoning, and the people duly inflict this punishment on the blasphemer. In attempting to read the episode in context, Adriane Leveen finds a surprising message:

[One] key theme in this episode that connects it to [the previous chapters] is that of the ger, or stranger, [generally understood to be a non-Israelite who comes to live among the Israelites]. The term ger appears twice in this passage . . . : “The entire assembly shall stone [the blasphemer]; the ger and the citizen alike. . . . One rule shall be for you; the ger and the citizen alike.”

In general, the latter half of Leviticus has a lot to say about the ger and the remarkable attempt to integrate [strangers] partially into Israelite society by obligating them to observe some commandments and granting them certain benefits. Thus, they are explicitly included in rules of Yom Kippur and sacrifice and exhorted to keep God’s laws. They are allowed to gather fruit fallen from a vine and to glean the edges of fields along with the Israelite poor. Lest readers fail to grasp the implication of these insistent rules, Leviticus 19:33-34 states: “And if a ger sojourns with you in your land, do not wrong him; like a citizen among you shall be the ger to you . . .”.

The inclusion of the ger [in the passage on blasphemy] highlights what could be called the negative side of this equation. The ger is to be punished for violating the sanctity of Israel’s God just as an Israelite would be.

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.