It is only a matter of time, writes Amos Yadlin, before Hamas attempts to send its forces into Israel via tunnels. The IDF can limit its response to occasional, circumscribed sorties into Gaza, but such an approach is likely to escalate into open conflict despite Israeli efforts to the contrary. Thus, absent a technological equivalent of the Iron Dome missile-defense system for repulsing tunnel attacks, Israel must prepare for a preemptive strike:

Operation Protective Edge proved that attack tunnels dug beneath the border of the Gaza Strip were almost the only strategic tool Hamas possessed to attain any significant gain, and most of its other so-called surprises and military efforts—long-range rockets, drones, and naval commandos—failed. . . .

[E]ventually, Hamas will force Israel into another conflict. Since, [as a general principle], a preventive strike is better [than being dragged into war on the enemy’s terms], the first question, more important than the tunnels, is: what is the objective of the future round of fighting and how prepared is Israel? . . .

Israel must establish that the discovery of cross-border tunnels ready for Hamas attacks requires preemptive action. If such action should escalate into a full-blown conflict, the conflict must be brief but forceful, based on a clear strategic objective that unlike all previous military encounters has the potential to effect a fundamental change in the balance of power and the dynamics between the sides.

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.