At the ten-year anniversary of the second Lebanon war, a number of Israeli commentators have argued that, contrary to the common view of that conflict as a fiasco, it actually secured a decade of quiet from Hizballah. Ruthie Blum is more skeptical:

The Winograd Commission, set up in the aftermath of the war, delved into [various mistakes made by the military and the government]. But the real culprit was a false assessment, reached more than a ‎decade earlier, that the “conventional battlefield” was a thing of the past. According to that ridiculous ‎theory, it would be wasteful to expend energy and resources training for ground incursions when the ‎era of high-tech sorties from the air was the wave of the future.‎ . . .

[Meanwhile, the UN] peacekeeping force [established as part of the ceasefire], which was supposed to prevent Hizballah from ‎transporting and rebuilding its arsenals, did nothing.

But the most damning evidence, according to Blum, is that Hizballah now has over twenty times more rockets than it did in the last war, and more sophisticated ones at that—and, thanks to the Syria conflict, it has become a battle-hardened force with significant regional influence.

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.