Fifteen years ago last Sunday, Israel announced its unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, ending an eighteen-year war. The move emboldened Israel’s enemy, Hizballah, and provided a model for terrorists throughout the region, writes Mitch Ginsburg:

At the time [of the withdrawal] there seemed to be a problem—that the war was killing more Israelis than it was saving, roughly two-dozen soldiers per year on average—and it seemed that the problem could be solved by retreating. . . .

Yossi Kuperwasser . . . was, in May 2000, the chief intelligence officer of the IDF central command. Hizballah’s ability to oust Israel from Lebanon, he said, was “wind in the sails” of the Palestinian militant groups in the West Bank, which, four months later, launched the bloody second intifada.

Palestinians, he said, would tell him often that two-dozen dead soldiers a year for several years in a row was an attainable goal for the Palestinian groups if it proved sufficient to pry Israel off certain parcels of land. He said he would always tell his Palestinian peers that there was a big difference between the West Bank—the land of the Bible, . . . in which Israel had built civilian settlements—and Lebanon, which was neither settled nor part of the promised land.

Today Hizballah is considered by many to be the strongest non-state actor in the world. It has upward of 100,000 rockets in its possession and veto power in Lebanon’s national government. Would it have reached this position without an Israeli withdrawal? Would the second Lebanon war [in 2006] have been necessary?

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.