While Israel’s navy played a crucial role in its victory in the Yom Kippur War and does much now to keep weapons shipments from arriving in Gaza, it has always been dwarfed by the other branches of the IDF. Seth Cropsey, who served as undersecretary of the Navy in two U.S. administrations, believes that the Jewish state will need to develop its maritime capabilities much more in the coming years—and that America has an interest in helping:

[Since the 1970s], Israeli [military] planners could rely on the U.S. Sixth Fleet to protect the Jewish state’s western border from seaborne attack. No more. The U.S. Sixth Fleet’s permanent presence today consists of a single command ship and four ballistic-missile defense destroyers based in Spain, outside the Mediterranean. . . .

Growing economic interests are likely to shift the Israeli military’s focus to the sea, which in turn will reveal the large security benefits a robust naval presence offers the Jewish state. . . . Even if Israel’s neighbors did not include Islamic State, an al-Qaeda affiliate, an Iranian terrorist group masquerading as a political party, and a Russian proxy regime, sea shipment is the only viable option for bulk goods. . . .

Aside from its deterrent value, seapower gives Israel greater conventional strategic depth and flexibility. . . . Increased seapower would [also] be useful in a conflict with Iran, and all the more applicable as the regime in Tehran uses new sources of wealth to extend its reach into the Red and Mediterranean Seas.

A strong navy and an Israeli government increasingly engaged with the sea support the common interest that Washington and Jerusalem have . . . in maintaining open navigation and free trade. The two share regional rivals (Iran foremost among them), and both benefit from political stability. The irregular threats that face Israel are also threats to the United States. When dealing with Russia and Turkey, low-end insurgencies like Islamic State and Hamas, and mixed threats like Hizballah and Iran, the U.S. benefits from a stronger Israeli navy.

The Israeli government’s greatest maritime challenge in the next decade will not be expanding its navy or cultivating external energy assets, but reframing its view of the sea. It faces a transition from an economic to a geostrategic view of the sea, and must take a hard look at the role of seapower in its national strategy.

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.