Last week, the Supreme Court heard the case of Ari Zivotofsky, a boy born in Jerusalem whose parents want his country of birth to be listed on his passport. (It currently reads only “Jerusalem.”) The legalities of the case are straightforward: Congress passed a law requiring that such passports read “Jerusalem, Israel”; the executive branch has ignored the law, claiming management of these matters as its prerogative. At issue here, argues Yishai Schwartz, is whether Congress supervises foreign policy, while allowing considerable discretion to the executive, or the president’s power in foreign affairs is absolute. It would be good, writes Schwartz, for the Court to make clear that the Constitution establishes the former view.

On Monday, the Court will have the opportunity to finally weigh these two views of presidential power. The case could not come at a more opportune time. President Obama, especially, has pushed his independent war-making powers to (and some would say beyond) their outer limits. He has stared down congressional hawks over Iran, and may soon try to loosen sanctions unilaterally. Congress and the courts must reassert themselves. This case, where the president is acting in defiance of explicit congressional legislation and where his power is at its “lowest ebb,” is the ideal means to do so.

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.