Benny Lau, a Jerusalem-based rabbi, has created a new website aimed at making the Hebrew Bible accessible to Israelis of all political and religious persuasions, hoping to bring them together in discussion of the sacred text. To judge by the traffic—a half-million visitors in the first two weeks—it may be working. Yair Rosenberg writes:

Launched over Hanukkah, 929 is a $12-million Israeli initiative to turn the Tanakh into a national conversation. Drawing its name from the 929 chapters of the Hebrew Bible, the project aims to get hundreds of thousands of Israelis from all walks of life to complete the corpus over three-and-a-half years by covering five chapters a week. (The endeavor is akin to the daf yomi cycle, where participants finish the entire Talmud over seven-and-a-half years, but pitched to a broader and more diverse audience.) The hub of the enterprise is its state-of-the-art website, where readers can find commentary from a wide array of contributors, from celebrated secular authors like Etgar Keret and A.B. Yehoshua to spiritual leaders like ultra-Orthodox former chief rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau and progressive trailblazer Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum.

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.