Nine years after the Gaza disengagement, about a third of the Jews forced to leave Gush Katif are still living nearby, often in temporary housing. Many are in the Negev community of Halutza, where they have built farms and planted orchards. Among other crops, they are growing citrons (etrogim), traditionally used in the rituals of the holiday of Sukot. Although they lost much of their crop this year to rocket attacks from Gaza, they have not lost hope.

“We believe in something. We have a mission,” [one resident] says. “We are building the tate of Israel. Now it’s the Negev. It’s the biggest national mission today, more than any other part of the country. And we don’t see the obstacles. We just see the target in front of our eyes.”

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.