In this week’s Torah reading of Koraḥ (Numbers 16-18), the title character leads a revolt against Moses, accusing him of corruptly giving his brother Aaron the position of high priest. The rebellion ends when the earth opens and swallows Koraḥ and his closest associates, and a heavenly fire consumes the rest of his followers. Understanding Koraḥ as an “archetypal populist,” Jonathan Sacks seeks to learn from the aftermath of the revolt:

First Koraḥ [claims that] the establishment (Moses and Aaron) is corrupt. Moses has been guilty of nepotism in appointing his own brother as high priest. He has kept the leadership roles within his immediate family instead of sharing them out more widely. Second, Koraḥ presents himself as the people’s champion. “The whole community,” he says, “is holy.” There is nothing special about you, Moses and Aaron. We have all seen God’s miracles and heard His voice. We all helped build His sanctuary. Koraḥ is posing as the democrat so that he can become the autocrat. . . .

For once in his life, Moses acted autocratically, putting God, as it were, to the test [by predicting a miraculous death for the rebels before hearing God’s response]. . . . Yet this dramatic effort at conflict resolution by the use of force failed completely. The . . . people, despite their terror, were unimpressed. “On the next day, however, the whole congregation of the Israelites rebelled against Moses and against Aaron, saying, ‘You have killed the people of the Lord’” (Numbers 17:6). Jews have always resisted autocratic leaders.

What is even more striking is the way the sages framed the conflict. Instead of seeing it as a black-and-white contrast between rebellion and obedience, they insisted on the validity of argument in the public domain. They said that what was wrong with Koraḥ and his fellows was not that they argued with Moses and Aaron, but that they did so “not for the sake of Heaven.” . . .

Judaism does not silence dissent: to the contrary, it dignifies it. This was institutionalized in the biblical era in the form of the prophets [and in] the rabbinic era it lived in the culture of argument evident on every page of the Mishnah, Talmud, and their commentaries. In the contemporary state of Israel, argumentativeness is part of the very texture of its democratic freedom, in the strongest possible contrast to much of the rest of the Middle East.

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.