The Nobel-Prize winning Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon was one of the pioneers of twentieth-century Hebrew literature. He is known for the sophisticated, allusive, sometimes cryptic style with which he paints his portraits of religious life and the inner religious world of his characters. His long short story “Twofold,” from 1939, tells of one man’s experience of Yom Kippur in Jerusalem. It has been rendered into English for the first time by Jeffrey Saks.

At that hour I had not prepared myself for Yom Kippur; rather, on the afternoon before Yom Kippur, toward evening, I went to the synagogue in my neighborhood, unlike every other year when I was accustomed to pray in the city. The Holy One blessed be He fills the whole world with His glory; wherever a man prays, his prayer is desired. How much more so in the synagogue, and how much more so in Jerusalem, which is wholly sanctified for prayer? It’s true that the synagogues in town are full of pious and perfect Jews who know how to appease their Creator with prayer and prayer leaders who pray with special intention. But, I said to myself, who am I that I should seek special intents? It’s enough for a man such as myself to pray that which is written in the mahzor.

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.