Last Thursday night, the lunar module designed by the private Israeli company SpaceIL and given the name Beresheet (Genesis) was expected to land on the moon. The unit had been successfully launched into lunar orbit, but the delicate piece of technology with which it measured the distance between itself and the moon’s surface malfunctioned, leading to a crash landing. Armin Rosen, who was present at the SpaceIL headquarters, reports:

The span between the first loss of telemetry and word that the landing failed was maybe three minutes tops, and probably much less. A cosmic drama quickly and unexpectedly became a human one. How do you make sense of getting so close and losing the mission? One could soon attain some purely descriptive understanding of what occurred: as Ofer Doron, [one of the mission’s overseers], told the media afterwards, a malfunction in the inertial measurement system led to a cascade of events that resulted in an accidental full-engine cutoff.

Beresheet was built with almost no redundancies, so there wasn’t a second computer to take over at the first sign of real trouble. The mission depended on a thin margin for error during the final 450 feet of its interplanetary journey (although it later turned out that the problems started fourteen kilometers from the surface). . . .

[O]ne of the funders of the mission likened the endeavor to the Passover song Dayeinu, [“it would have been enough for us”]: if the probe had merely succeeded in reaching its correct altitude after launch, dayeinu. If all of the maneuvers had merely gone successfully, dayeinu. If Beresheet had merely entered lunar orbit, dayeinu. There were countless dayeinus. One of the most audacious private space ventures ever attempted had been, at worst, a 95-percent success. “We got Israel to places we didn’t imagine before,” Kfir Damari, [one of the founders of SpaceIL], said. “The Israeli flag is still on the surface, on an Israeli-made spacecraft,” said [his cofounder] Yonatan Weintraub.

On Saturday, it was announced that work had commenced on Beresheet 2.

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.