During the ongoing wave of deadly terrorist attacks in Israel, there reportedly have been a few instances in which bystanders attacked the perpetrators after the latter had been rendered incapable of causing further harm. Shlomo Brody presents a halakhic perspective on such behavior:

The [talmudic] sages contend that the verse “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:16) not only demands saving a friend from drowning or from a hungry lion, but further dictates stopping an assailant from committing murder. This mandate was extended to both threatened victims and bystanders alike. . . .

Jewish scholars debated what guidelines might be issued for those trying to stop the assailant. . . . [I]t is not always easy to know when a threat has been fully neutralized, especially when a wounded terrorist continues to struggle. Nonetheless, [there is a general consensus that] once the assailant is clearly incapacitated, one is not allowed to kill him, whether out of [a desire for] vengeance or [a sense] of vigilante justice.

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.