A prominent Israeli rabbi recently made headlines for suggesting that artificial meat grown from the stem cells of pigs would be kosher. Gil Student argues that the halakhic consensus is not on the rabbi’s side:

One argument in favor [of permitting the meat] is that the pig stem cells are microscopic. Since the Torah, [according to traditional rabbinic interpretation], does not forbid anything that is invisible to the naked eye, the cell itself is permissible. Therefore, any meat that grows from it must be permissible as well.

Both Rabbi J. David Bleich and Rabbi Ya’akov Ariel point out that in this case we do not discount the microscopic cell because we manipulate it. It comes from a large animal and will grow into a visible item, and, in between, humans interact with it. . . .

[One argument in favor of allowing the meats draws on the halakhic rule that] a prohibited item is permitted when diluted in a mixture in which it is either a simple minority or less than one-sixtieth, depending on the circumstance. When a pig cell is added to a growth medium, the cell is diluted by much more than one-sixtieth. Therefore, it should be permitted. . . .

Ariel, [however, argues] that there is no actual mixture. The pig stem cell is placed in a growth medium and then grows. The result is many more pig cells that grow from the original stem cell. Rather than a mixture, this is just one substance growing substantially. The lab-grown meat consists of the original stem cell multiplied greatly, thus maintaining the forbidden status of the original cell.

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.