Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who served as the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Palestine, is generally regarded as the intellectual progenitor of religious Zionism. Born in Russia in 1865, Kook developed a theosophy that combined various strands of Jewish mysticism with ideas plucked from modern and secular currents, most importantly from secular Zionism. While strictly Orthodox, he rejected Orthodoxy’s view of Judaism as unchanging and called for a religious renewal made possible by Zionism; this, as Yehudah Mirsky points out in his recent biography, would lead to reconciliation between religious and secular Jews and hasten the coming of the messiah. Samuel Thrope writes:

In his own way, Kook was no less radical than the young [secular Zionist] pioneers. Unlike other representatives of traditional Judaism in Palestine, he did not dismiss the anti-religious Zionists as heretics and sinners. His Kook’s response to Zionism’s revolutionary, secular challenge to tradition—its claim to have wrested the mantle of Jewishness from Judaism—was to transform it into theology. Even as the pioneers sought to sacralize their secular undertaking, Kook intended to re-appropriate Jewish nationalism as a religious movement springing from the deepest wells of the faith. The pioneers might have seen themselves as socialists and enlightened rebels; in Kook’s admiring eyes, they were unwitting saints.

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.