Israel has been slow in tapping into the large reserves of natural gas that have been found off its coast. Explaining the political and legal issues that have delayed further pumping of gas, Haviv Rettig Gur comments on the strategic significance of the reserves themselves:

Prime Minister Netanyahu has something of a grand strategy for Israel that sees the Jewish state transforming into a military and economic anchor for an anti-Iranian regional alliance. Higher electric bills are a very small price to pay for Israel becoming a major regional energy supplier to as many allies as possible, as quickly as possible. In the Jordanian case, for example, such a role buttresses a relationship that helps stabilize the West Bank and maintain Jordan as a buffer to the east. With Greece, it helps solidify the interest of both nations to unite in their shared desire to counter an increasingly antagonistic Turkey.

And it hardly hurts that this new role also emphasizes to Washington—still Israel’s major source for both sophisticated military hardware and international backing—the Jewish state’s increasing indispensability in a region marked by the fragility of other allies and past arrangements.

It says a lot about the sheer novelty of Israel’s new status as a budding energy power that this part of the equation, which is both the most obvious and the most significant benefit Israel stands to gain from the gas finds, is largely missing in the national debate.

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.