After much debate and parliamentary wrangling, the Knesset passed a law on Monday obligating non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive more than half of their funding from foreign governments to disclose the fact publicly. Foreign and domestic critics have vigorously denounced the law as anti-democratic and evidence of creeping “fascism” in the Jewish state. Meanwhile, on Tuesday, the U.S. Congress released a bipartisan report stating that an Israeli NGO funded by the State Department used its resources to aid the effort to unseat Netanyahu in Israel’s 2015 elections. Elliott Abrams comments:

In Israel, many leftist groups that endlessly attack not only the current government and its policies but their country’s legitimacy and the conduct of the IDF have been funded largely by European countries. The new Israeli law does not prevent [foreign funding], and does not interfere with free speech, but merely says the financial facts must be stated in all public communications by the recipient Israeli group. No doubt the net effect will be to undermine the credibility of such groups, or so it seems to me—and presumably to the new law’s drafters. If you learn Monday that the Netherlands loudly denounced Israel in the UN, and Tuesday that some Israeli group denouncing the government is funded by the Netherlands, you may well put two and two together. In any event, you ought to have the relevant information. . . . .

[In light of the recent Senate report], it any wonder that Israeli lawmakers on the right passed this law? Not only European governments but that of the U.S are in fact doing what Netanyahu denounced: meddling in Israel’s politics. The new law calls for transparency, and nothing more.

And next time you read about bad feeling between Netanyahu and Obama, remember that bipartisan Senate report. Netanyahu opposed Obama’s Iran deal. For this he was accused of meddling in American politics. What did the Obama administration do? It funded a campaign to get Netanyahu thrown out of office.

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.