For most people, “Jewish music” implies klezmer, East European folk tunes, or liturgical compositions. But for over a century, Jewish composers have created art music based on a variety of Jewish themes. At a recent concert, reviewed by Barrymore Laurence Scherer, the Ariel Quartet performed some of the best examples from Israel in particular:

The program showcased three generations of Israeli composers, and featured works by Paul Ben-Haim (1897-1984), Mark Kopytman (1929-2011), and Menachem Wiesenberg (b. 1950). Ben-Haim immigrated to Israel from Germany; Kopytman, from Soviet Ukraine. Mr. Wiesenberg is a sabra (an Israeli native). None of their rigorously modernist music displays the overt Yiddish sound of, say, the klezmer tune that enlivens the third movement of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, or even the deliberate Hebraic flavor of Bloch’s tone poem for cello and orchestra, Schelomo. But when you listen carefully, the music’s roots make themselves apparent.

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.