In a recent interview, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York floated the idea that Congress should consider selectively reducing aid to Israel to punish the country for handing Benjamin Netanyahu an electoral victory. Jonathan Tobin comments that, while Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks conveyed little more than her own ignorance of the issue, there is a better case to be made for reconsidering the nature of Washington’s support for the IDF:

There was a time when Israel desperately needed both U.S. economic and military aid. But in 1996, Netanyahu told a joint session of Congress that it was time to end the economic portion of the assistance. With free-market reforms enabling it to break free of the shackles imposed by its socialist founders, Israel no longer needed economic subsidies. But defense requirements were different. With so many of its foes, including Gulf states, able to buy the most sophisticated U.S. weapons, Israel needed to keep up and maintain a qualitative advantage that ensured its security.

But 23 years later, the political price of accepting U.S. aid remains onerous. It limits Israel’s options and flexibility with respect to defense procurement, especially when it comes to its own industries. It also creates the impression that Israel is a beggar that requires Washington’s assistance in order to defend itself. . . .

For far too long, pro-Israel activism was solely the function of keeping aid flowing to Jerusalem. While the Israel Defense Force has benefited from such assistance, it’s time to acknowledge that the Jewish state is on a path to paying its own way, even when it comes to defense. In the long run, that will be far healthier for both Israel’s economy and for strengthening the relationship between two democracies that should relate to each other as friends and allies, not as a patron and a dependent client state.

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.