The Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon and J.R R. Tolkien, the English author of Lord of the Rings, do not appear to have much in common. Yet, aside from being near-contemporaries, both were religiously devout, allowed religion to inform their work, and were profoundly influenced (both personally and in their fiction) by the trauma of World War I. Do the similarities end there? Jeffrey Saks writes:

It is precisely in regard to what he called Mythopoeia (a term he coined, meaning “mythos-making”) that Tolkien draws our attention and invites comparison to the greatest modern Hebrew author, S.Y. Agnon—the only Nobel winner for Hebrew literature. . . . [T]here are various ways Tolkien and Agnon resemble each other—a love of nature and the outdoors, appreciation for a good drink, a bookish reclusiveness mixed with a gregarious wit—indeed, there was something quite “Hobbitish” about both men as they moved into later life. Isn’t the Shire [the bucolic Eden of Tolkien’s novels] itself something like a Middle Earth version of the [East European] shtetl? Both are principally closed societies whose residents exist, to varying degrees, in naïve isolation from and in suspicion of the larger, outside world.

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.