In the Hebrew Bible, God curses Cain after he kills Abel, and tells the Israelites that terrible curses will befall them if they do not follow His laws. Humans also place curses on themselves or others. Scholars of the ancient Middle East have come to understand such curses, which were no less common among the Israelites’ neighbors, as an important part of ancient legal systems, and also as a form of prayer, as Anne Marie Kitz writes (free registration required):

Oaths required petitioners to call upon the deities to punish them should they lie or be unfaithful to the terms of a contract. Such conditional self-curses were not taken lightly. This was especially the case because people were typically made to swear on a weapon that purportedly belonged to the deity. Should an individual violate the oath, the weapon would be used to execute the penalty, usually death, as an expression of divine judgment. . . .

Curses and blessings [are] nothing other than prayers uttered by mortals to the divinities. They are neither commands nor demands, and there is certainly no assumption on the part of the speaker that either will have instantaneous effect. In the end they are little more than strongly articulated wishes. Deities, on the other hand, articulated curses differently. As supreme beings they did not need to invoke a higher power to enact a malediction. Their curses were commands that mortals believed had immediate consequences.

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.