The Israeli television series Fauda—which, thanks to Netflix, has become an international hit—depicts an IDF counterterrorism unit and its duel with a Hamas mastermind in the West Bank. Reviewing the show, which takes its name from the Arabic word for “chaos,” A.E. Smith writes:

In a number of key respects, Fauda gets the reality of life inside counterterrorism agencies, probably helped by the fact that its creators . . . both served in the IDF’s Duvdevan special-operations unit. For if the series has a prevailing theme, it is disguise, deception, and the manner in which operators . . . lose themselves within their own dissimulations. Daily proximity to the adversary brings an unparalleled level of intimacy, and often the two sides come to identify with each other in unexpected ways.

Members of [the] team slip in and out of their identities as Palestinian Arabs, quite literally as easily as they change clothes. When [one] arrives at the wedding [where the Hamas operative is to be found], he transforms into an Arab before our eyes. His look, his movements, the genuine joy he seems to be feeling at being part of the celebration—he seems to have become what he is pretending to be.

The risk here—for [Fauda’s characters], for cops and intelligence officers, even for terrorists—is that such sustained intimacy becomes normal. The job and the adversary become more real, more meaningful, than husbands, wives, children, lovers.

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.