A generation or two ago, writes Moshe Koppel, the denominational divisions among American Jews—between Conservative and Modern Orthodox, for example, or Modern Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox, did not cut so deeply as they do now. Yet that has changed as the non-Orthodox denominations have gone into decline and Orthodox institutions have proliferated; today, adherents can spend their lives in the confines of their particular ideological sub-group. In Israel, by contrast, the opposite has happened, as once-ironclad divisions among the secular, religious Zionist, and ultra-Orthodox have begun to break down:

[Secular and religious Zionist youths] meet in the army and at work and they speak to each other with typical Israeli candidness, free of both rancor and the kind of reserve that typically stems from distance or mistrust. Increasingly, [ultra-Orthodox] kids are participating in these conversations as well; as soon as a technical solution is found to the problem of ḥaredi enlistment [in the military], the gap between them and the others will close very quickly.

In short, the boxes are breaking down in Israel. This has two salient consequences, each of which is only now beginning to become apparent. The first is that the question “are you ḥiloni [secular] or dati [religious] or ḥaredi [ultra-Orthodox]?” is, for many people, becoming hard to answer. Increasingly, degrees of Jewish observance in Israel lie on a spectrum, not in the familiar boxes, slowly converging to a normal distribution over the range, with a peak somewhere in the center that drops off slowly and symmetrically. (One consequence of this is long tails on each end populated by loud and strident outliers, giving the false impression that extremists are getting stronger.)

The second consequence is that the usual bundlings of ideologies, religious practices, and outward signals are unraveling. [Israelis] became accustomed to the idea that if they knew how someone dressed or how he acted in a given situation or where he went to yeshiva, they could pretty much guess all the rest. Forget that. The flourishing of a Jewish state and the confidence it has brought are leading to a new and surprising realignment.

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.