The Hebrew Bible generally refers to Jews by some variation of the word Israel. (The word Jew does not appear as such until the later biblical books.) Yet, occasionally, Jews are designated as Hebrews. Yitzhaq Feder notes an interesting pattern:

[T]he bulk of occurrences of this term in the Bible appear in the speech of Egyptians and Philistines in reference to the Israelites, and a more thorough survey of these occurrences suggests that this term was indeed a derogatory racial slur. . . . The most thorough exposition of this approach is the literary critic Meir Sternberg’s epic work Hebrews between Cultures (1999), which argues that “Hebrew is a codeword for the Bible’s in-group as misrepresented from the outside by the arch-foreigner, the [Egyptian].”

This raises another question, says Feder: “If Hebrew is a derogatory term, why do we find it used by Israelites, by the narrator, and even by God?” His answer: the Torah uses the word in the book of Exodus for its dramatic effect, highlighting the reversal of roles; it is the lowly Hebrew slaves who, through divine intervention, will come to be treated with fear and deference by their once-contemptuous Egyptian masters.

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.