In the northern New Jersey town of Mahwah, an expanding Orthodox community has attempted to set up an eruv, a sort of legal fiction that allows for carrying out of doors on Shabbat. The town’s government recently ruled that the eruv—which consists of small pieces of white PVC piping attached to utility poles—violated local zoning laws. On Wednesday some parts of the eruv were vandalized. The editors of NorthJersey.com take issue with Mahwah’s decision:

Signs are prohibited on trees, rocks, and utility poles in Mahwah. [But an] eruv is a reasonable religious accommodation; it is not a sign. . . . Orange & Rockland Utilities, which owns the poles, has given permission. . . to install the pipe.

We understand some may not like the aesthetics of the piping, just as some people don’t like solar panels attached to utility poles. But, first, these are utility poles, not majestic oaks. And second, the ability to worship without government interference is a constitutional right. . . .

Mahwah’s Mayor Bill Laforet said [that the eruv decision] “sends a very strong message to those who choose to violate our sign ordinances.” It sends a very different kind of strong message about Mahwah. . . . An online petition against the eruv, titled “Protect the Quality of Our Community in Mahwah,” lists over 1,200 supporters. Some of the comments are ugly: “This group of people are known for entering a community and taking it over for their own advantage. They are known for taking a lovely community and turning it into a run-down, dirty, unwanted place to live.”

That is not a comment against signs, but one against Orthodox Jews. Some white PVC piping is not an overt expression of any faith. It is not akin to placing crosses on public structures; it’s plastic piping on utility poles with permission from the owners of the utility poles. . . . The eruv should stay.

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.