While the America-Israel relationship began as one of a great power extending a hand to a vulnerable fledgling state, it has grown, in the words of Yoram Ettinger, into “an exceptionally productive, mutually beneficial alliance.” He explains:

Israel has been the most cost-effective, battle-tested laboratory of U.S. defense industries [and] the most reliable and practical beachhead and outpost of the U.S. defense forces, sharing with the U.S. unique intelligence, battle experience, and battle tactics. . . .

The plant manager of Fort Worth-based General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the F-16, asserted that Israeli lessons have spared the manufacturer ten to twenty years of research and development, leading to over 700 modifications in the current generation of the F-16, “valued at a mega-billion-dollar bonanza to the manufacturer.” . . .

According to George Keegan, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence chief, the value of intelligence shared by Israel with the U.S.—exposing the air capabilities of adversaries, their new military systems, electronics, and jamming devices—“could not be procured with five CIAs.” . . .

Israel [is] a special strategic partner to America—and not a member of the “foreign-aid” club of supplicants—increasingly contributing to mutually beneficial . . . joint ventures.

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.