In this week’s Torah reading of Shlaḥ-l’kha (Numbers 13-15), Moses and the Israelites are poised to enter the promised land, and send twelve spies in advance to scout it out. When ten of them report back that the land, inhabited by fortress-dwelling giants, is unconquerable, the people lose their faith and sink into despair, and God decrees that they must wander in the desert for 40 years until the adults have died off. Thus it will be the next generation, raised not in Egyptian slavery but in the desert wilderness, that will inherit the land. Jonathan Sacks comments:

According to Maimonides, . . . the verdict [was not] a punishment as such. It was an inevitable consequence of human nature. It takes more than a few days or weeks to turn a population of slaves into a nation capable of handling the responsibilities of freedom. In the case of the Israelites, it took a generation born in liberty, hardened by the experience of the desert, untrammeled by habits of servitude. Freedom takes time, and there are no shortcuts. Often it takes a very long time indeed.

That dimension of time is fundamental to the Jewish view of politics and human progress. . . . Unlike in Christianity or Islam, there is, in Judaism, no sudden transformation of the human condition, no one moment or single generation in which everything significant is fully disclosed. . . . There are some things a parent may not do for a child if he or she wants the child to become an adult. There are some things even God must choose not to do for His people if He wants them to grow to moral and political maturity. . . .

One of the odd facts about Western civilization in recent centuries is that the people who have been most eloquent about tradition—Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott, T.S. Eliot—have been deeply conservative, defenders of the status quo. Yet there is no reason why a tradition should be conservative. We can hand on to our children not only our past but also our unrealized ideals. We can want them to go beyond us; to travel farther on the road to freedom than we were able to do. . . . That is the lesson of the spies. Despite the divine anger, the people were not condemned to permanent exile. They simply had to face the fact that their children would achieve what they themselves were not ready for.

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.