In the wake of the Senate report on the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation procedures, some Jewish organizations rushed to declare that torture always and in all forms conflicts with Jewish values. A handful of Orthodox rabbis and legal scholars have produced more nuanced views, as Shlomo Brody writes:

[Michael] Broyde, for example, has claimed that the “wholesale suspension of the sanctity of life that occurs in wartime also entails the suspension of such secondary human-rights issues as the notion of human dignity, the fear of the ethical decline of our soldiers, or even the historical fear of our ongoing victimhood.” This logic would justify water boarding and similar interrogative tactics. But Broyde is quick to note that just because some actions might be allowed under Jewish war ethics, that doesn’t make them strategically prudent or legal under national law or international accords. . .

Yet even if Broyde is correct regarding his broader claim about Jewish war ethics (a disputed argument), the particular implications of his “war-necessity” thesis for torture make many uneasy.

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.