Were he appointed dictator for a day, Gilad Alper knows what he would do to fix Israel’s economy: abolish certain taxes, deregulate imports from Europe and the U.S., and address the perennial issues of housing costs and educational inequality:

The high cost of housing is largely due to state control of 93 percent of land and to the planning committees, a cumbersome bureaucratic mechanism that only benefits the clerks who work there. The dictatorial solution? Selling all the land to all who are interested and disbanding the planning committees. Let the citizens build houses and businesses. Release us from the stranglehold of bureaucrats.

The most challenging but perhaps the most important issue [is] education. The educational system is a clumsy behemoth because it is a state monopoly. The only solutions the present system can provide waste buckets of money on pathetic and ineffective “reforms.” The real solution is increasing competition and breaking the government stranglehold. We can achieve this through the voucher system—an equal distribution of tax money to parents that is to be used to send their children to a private school of their choosing.

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.