In 1621, the famed talmudist and mystic Isaiah Horowitz left his native Prague, where he had served as rabbi to what was then the world’s largest Jewish community, to settle in Jerusalem. Two of his letters home remain extant and provide a rare window into contemporary Jewish life in the land of Israel. Ora recounts some of Horowitz’s experiences:

He traveled to Israel via Syria. The two main Jewish communities in Israel in those days were in Safed and Jerusalem. Both communities sent emissaries to convince [Horowitz] to accept a position as their leader. The emissaries from Safed made it first and met [him] in Damascus, where he told them that he intended to stay in Safed anyway for a few days and that they could talk further there.

The Jerusalemite emissary met the rabbi on his way out of Damascus. The people of Jerusalem were generous in their offer as they were concerned that Safed would bait the rabbi before they even got there. And so they offered [him the position of] head of both the rabbinical court . . . and the yeshiva in the Holy City. They were willing to pay him any salary he wished.

But [Horowitz] didn’t need convincing: he was simply overjoyed that he could realize his dream and live in Jerusalem. He even refused to accept a salary, because he knew that the Jerusalem community was sunk in debt, and instead he asked for a furnished apartment and for the community to cover his tax bill. An apartment, because “there is not much room in Jerusalem, because the Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem is twice as large as that of Safed, and it’s growing daily.”

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.