The 1st-century historian wrote a detailed description of a war fought between the Roman empire and North African insurgents led by a former Roman soldier named Tacfarinas. The Romans enjoyed superior resources, training, and equipment, but Tacfarinas’ forces achieved great success against them with guerrilla tactics. Nevertheless, Rome eventually won. The lessons for the U.S. war on terror, and Israel’s wars with Hamas and Hizballah, are evident. Jakub Grygiel writes:

Tacfarinas . . . in Tacitus’ evocative phrase . . . began to scatter the war, sowing terror and disruption here and there, retreating and advancing, moving to the front and then to the rear of Roman forces. . . . A relatively small rebellion became a ubiquitous war, engulfing a whole region and creating a series of challenges to the defending army. . . .

Perhaps more importantly from the political perspective, . . . Tacfarinas realized that he did not need to kill Roman soldiers to defeat them. . . . He could simply chip away at Rome’s authority and its reputation for power by mocking its forces militarily, showing that its mighty legions could not win against an enemy that they could not fix in place. . . .

The Romans had to become more like Tacfarinas’ confederation of tribes [in order to win], and so began to fight him with tactics not dissimilar from his. . . . The broad goal was to make the [insurgents] as afraid of a raid as the Romans were, while at the same time limiting their mobility by fortifying potential targets and key roads.

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.