A recent global study ranks 158 countries in order of the overall happiness of their inhabitants; Israel ranked eleventh—ahead of the U.S., France, and Britain. Aaron David Miller speculates as to why this might be:

[There] is [a] very strong sense of identity that . . . seems to shape the way Israelis look at themselves and the rest of the world. Amidst all the fractiousness and divisiveness, the secular and religious divide, the crudeness of political life, and the unresolved Palestinian problem, there’s still among Israelis I have met over the years a real sense of purpose, community, and pride of accomplishment. So perhaps what at first appears counterintuitive really isn’t.

Nahum Barnea, perhaps one of the keenest observers of Israeli politics and a guy who’s fully attuned to the tremendous challenges facing his country, argues in [a] recent article that this sense of involvement and participation is key. Sure, life in Denmark “is happy: relaxed, leisurely, stable. In Israel, on the other hand, life is good: interesting, dynamic, calling for involvement. Most Israelis, it seems, prefer the good life.”

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.