Earlier this month, the IDF took the unprecedented step of releasing a document outlining its updated strategic doctrines. Gabi Siboni explains why the report and its content matter:

The publication of The IDF Strategy [is in itself] a milestone in the relationship between the military and the civilian populations, and it is impossible to overstate the importance of the transparency manifested by the very publication of the document. . . .

In the most recent campaigns in Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2009, 2011, 2014), the IDF took action according to the “erosion” principle: even if not articulated explicitly, the IDF used the idea of reducing the enemy’s force as its guiding principle. Thus, the IDF used increasingly larger amounts of firepower to target the enemy’s capabilities and operational infrastructures. This principle took a toll on the Israeli home front, manifested in an extended combat period, during which the enemy continued to maintain its ability to fire rockets and missiles. The enemy, unconcerned about its own survival, could remain impervious to the scope of the destruction and damage wrought by the IDF.

The new IDF document presents an essentially different approach to action: in response to provocations, the IDF will attack the enemy using integrated capabilities, immediately and simultaneously. The ground maneuver is given importance in its updated role, which is to penetrate enemy territory rapidly in order to damage the survivability of the enemy’s governing bodies and destroy its military infrastructures. . . . These actions will be supported by special operations, cyber operations, high-quality intelligence, and the most effective defenses possible against enemy fire.

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.