The poet and actor Avraham Ḥalfi (1906-1980) is the subject of a recent documentary, itself part of a “small flood” of films about the great figures of modern Hebrew literature. In his review, Michael Weingrad considers Ḥalfi’s work and notes the limits of film for conveying something about poetry:

As [the] documentary about the poet shows, Ḥalfi himself was something of a puzzle. A writer of bewitching intimacy, he nevertheless refused to describe himself as a poet or read his verse in public. He called himself an actor and had a long and successful theatrical career, with a late cinematic turn in the dark, absurdist 1972 film Floch, written by the distinguished playwright Hanoch Levin. . . .

Yet the documentary impulse eventually halts before the enigma of the poet’s personality and the sufficiency of his or her poems. . . . [This] film . . . amuses and entices but cannot explain Ḥalfi or the smoldering confidences of his verse. His poems are movingly revelatory, but what they reveal are further secrets, pregnant silences, reservoirs of unspoken loss.

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.