News broke last week that Gonen Segey, a former Knesset member and minister of energy and infrastructure, had been arrested in Israel on charges of spying for Iran. Segev, who had previously served a prison term for drug smuggling, fraud, and forgery, has been out of office since 1996. Eran Lerman tries to make sense of this turn of events:

If [Iranian intelligence] did, in fact, see Segev as an asset worth cultivating, it raises questions as to the value of the information he supplied and the priority given to the information Iranian intelligence was tasked with obtaining. We can already say with certainty that this was not information about plans by the Israeli government that would deter Iran. For some time now, Segev has not had access to that kind of information, and his conviction for drug dealing has kept him at a distance from power players. . . .

[T]he Iranians—seeking to destroy Israel—are mainly interested in identifying targets to attack, especially major ones. The former energy minister is an asset who can produce a lot in this area, as someone who was responsible for sensitive infrastructure systems.

It is hard to say how much damage has been done and it will be discovered only through a detailed investigation. But even if we are satisfied with what we already know, we can understand plenty about Iran and its goals and the limits of the Iranian intelligence community’s capabilities. If this is the best they could do, Israel’s proven intelligence superiority is in no danger.

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.