In honor of Israel’s Independence Day, celebrated last Thursday, Boaz Levi reflects on the Jewish state’s accomplishments: rising immigration, declining emigration, a robust birthrate, and high wages. And that’s not all:

Although there are people who want us to think otherwise, it turns out we just have it good here. Israelis are happy with life. The world happiness index recently placed Israel at eleventh. An internal CBS survey had 86 percent of Israelis saying they were satisfied with their lives, as opposed to 83 percent in the beginning of the 2000s. It’s therefore no surprise that according to a new report, Israel has a suicide rate lower than that of every European country but one.

Israelis’ happiness finds expression in other impressive statistics as well. According to the data, Israeli life expectancy is 1.5 years higher than the average for the developed world. . . .

Our national challenges have not ended, and probably never will. But still, . . . Israel has done the impossible in the 68 years of its existence. Starting off with many difficulties and unending obstacles, Israelis have managed to build a model society: a society that grants the long-suffering Jewish people cultural prosperity, a thriving economy, and damn it—the strongest army in the Middle East.

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.