Since the economic reforms of the 1990s, Israel has become a country that leads the world in the number of initial public offerings (IPOs) per capita—the so-called start-up nation. Yet this trend is beginning to slow. Peter Cohan argues that a change is necessary in order for the Jewish state to continue its extraordinary economic growth:

[T]he most significant transformation that Israel must undertake [is to go] from a creator of business leaders whom I call sprinters—who can turn an idea into a company that gets bought out by a larger one—to a nation of marathoners—who take such companies public, generate revenues in the billions of dollars, and keep growing at a rate of 20 percent or more.

This matters because if Israel can produce more marathoners, it can host more . . . locally headquartered, publicly traded companies that invest in local startups to create more local jobs and provide tax revenue to help fund the expansion of infrastructure needed to reduce the traffic and housing crunch that accompanies Israel’s current economic success.

Whether such “marathoners” will emerge remains to be seen, writes Cohan, but he believes it to be possible.

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.