Venezuela has not had diplomatic relations with Israel for more than 15 years. There is no embassy. There hasn’t been one since Hugo Chávez expelled the Israeli ambassador in 2006 and accused Israel of committing something worse than the Holocaust. Venezuelan state radio recommended reading the antisemitic screed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Swastikas went up next to Stars of David in Caracas. Synagogues were attacked. Venezuelan Jews were pressured to publicly renounce Israel or be treated as suspect.

Over the past 20 years, the Venezuelan government has helped write the modern script for demonizing the Jewish state, the same script recycled today at the United Nations and on college campuses.

However, within hours of the earthquake that devastated large parts of the country on June 24, Israel sent help to Venezuela anyway. Numerous Israeli NGOs were on the ground within hours, including Magen David Adom, IsraAID, ZAKA, SmartAID and Natan. These NGOs are providing medical and psychological first aid, search-and-rescue expertise, basic hygiene supplies, established off-grid clean energy, water purification and Starlink communication systems.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dispatched official delegations from the Foreign Ministry and the Israel Defense Forces search-and-rescue units.

Other Jewish groups sent aid, and offered financial and other support.

None of these organizations, nor the government of Israel, played politics or used diplomatic machinations when deciding to send relief. No one asked what Venezuela’s government had said about Israel last year or the year before that or for the last 20 years. They went and provided the help regardless.

Israel and the Jewish people do this because it is who we are. Assistance in times of need is not given only to friends but to anyone who needs it, as we are all God’s creation, even those who hate us.

Exodus 23:5 tells us that if you see your enemy’s donkey collapsing under its load, you do not walk past it. You stop and help him lift it up. Not your friend’s donkey. Your enemy’s. The Babylonian Talmud pushes it further. If your friend’s animal and your enemy’s animal both need help at the same moment, you help the enemy first. The sages say this is deliberate. It is there to break the grip of grudges before they take hold of you. Proverbs 25:21 reinforces this.

This lesson is in our genes and stems all the way from Abraham, who lived it out long before it was written down.

The city of Sodom stood for everything Abraham opposed: cruelty to the poor, contempt for strangers. When four invading kings captured the city and dragged off his nephew Lot along with everyone else, Abraham owed Sodom nothing. But he raised a militia, went to war and freed every captive, not just his own family members. When the king of Sodom offered him spoils in Genesis 14, Abraham refused to take so much as a sandal strap.

Later, in Genesis 18, when God told Abraham that he was going to destroy the city, Abraham stood before God and argued that it should be spared if even a handful of decent people could be found inside it.

He went to war and prayed for those who were anathema to him.

Isaac and Ishmael were rivals as children, and the Torah doesn’t hide it. Ishmael mocked Isaac, and the sages read that mockery as something far darker. He was expelled from Abraham’s house. Years later, it is Isaac himself, the one who was wronged, who goes back into the wilderness to bring Ishmael and his mother home.

Abraham never gave up on Ishmael either. To Abraham, Ishmael was still a son; to Isaac, he was still a brother; to both, he was still a human being. When Abraham dies, the two brothers bury him side by side, and Rashi points out that the text uses a word normally reserved for the righteous to describe the reunion.

Later in the Bible, in Deuteronomy 23:8, God commands something almost impossible: Don’t despise the Egyptian, the very nation that enslaved you and drowned your infants in the Nile, because once during a famine they gave you shelter. Don’t despise the Edomite either, ancestor of the empire that would one day burn the Temple to the ground and send the Israelites into 2,000 years of exile. Hold on to the gratitude; remember you are brothers.

Obviously, if they are trying to kill you, then defend yourself, but one must see the humanity even in those who hurt you the most. This is a powerful concept. Hold onto the gratitude. Remember the family tie. Let go of the hatred, even while remembering the harm.

None of this means Judaism asks us not to defend ourselves. When someone is actively trying to kill you, Jewish law is unambiguous. You defend yourself, without apology and without hesitation. Judaism was never a suicide pact.

But a government not currently pointing a weapon at you, however vicious its rhetoric has been, however much they have worked to undermine you in the past, is not that. A child pinned under concrete is not a threat. He is a human being, and Jewish law does not let us forget that distinction, even regarding our worst enemies.

When they raise a hand against us, we fight. When they don’t, we do everything we can to save them in their time of need.

That’s a commandment from God that over 4,000 years of history have etched onto the souls of Jews all over the globe and, of course, onto the State of Israel, which is doing what it was built to do.