Although most professed atheists reject religion in general, they usually have a specific religion in mind. The sociologist Peter Berger argues that today’s atheism has roots in “Abrahamic” monotheism, and the term applies only to those who reject the theologies of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. Usually they do so when confronted with the problem of theodicy: the idea of a just and benevolent God in a world manifestly filled with evil and suffering:

Suffering is endemic to the human condition, and so is the urge to overcome or at least to explain it. Different attempts to satisfy this urge are not neatly divided geographically. Theodicy in its full force is unlikely to appear in contexts shaped by the religious imagination of the Indian subcontinent, as manifested in Hinduism and Buddhism (the latter could only arise from the former). I have long argued that the most interesting religious dichotomy is between Jerusalem and Benares (now called Varanasi)—the city in which the Jewish Temple stood, where Jesus was crucified and resurrected, where Muhammad began his nocturnal journey to heaven—and that other city, where millions of pilgrims continue to immerse themselves in the holy waters of the river Ganges, and near which the Buddha preached his first sermon after attaining Enlightenment. . . . The fundamental assumption of the Indian view of the cosmos is reincarnation—the linked realities of samsara and karma, the endless cycle of rebirths and deaths, and the cosmic law that the consequences of human actions, good or bad, are carried from one life to the next. I would propose that in this view the “Jerusalem” problem of theodicy evaporates.

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.