The recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s spying on Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, including their communications with members of Congress, are cause for grave concern, writes Elliott Abrams. On the basis of his own experience in the State Department, he notes that, when given a similar opportunity, the Reagan administration declined to spy on an allied head of state, and explains why:

There are at least two kinds of communications that we should not monitor. The first would be communications of our close allies—people like Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor Angela Merkel, and top leaders of countries such as Japan, Australia, Canada, France, and Israel. To snoop on them is a betrayal of trust, of the assumption that we are dealing with each other directly as close allies. Because they are close allies, if we want to know what they are thinking and doing, we should ask them — not spy on them as a matter of course. The second category would be communications that logically and in practice intrude on members of Congress and other Americans who are going about entirely legitimate political activity. To aim at and to capture such communications is an abuse of executive power against Congress, and an abuse of citizens’ rights to engage in political activity in opposition to the administration in office. . . .

The Wall Street Journal says the NSA and the White House spied on Israeli efforts to lobby against the president’s Iran deal. . . . The administration faced a battle in Congress, and it spied on the other side. That’s the kind of conduct we see in third-world countries where control of the spy agency is one of the ways an incumbent regime holds on to power and defeats its political opponents. It ought to be a major scandal when such practices reach the United States.

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.