On Sunday, Hizballah launched a missile at an Israeli military base, destroying a vehicle but failing to harm any soldiers. The IDF responded by firing some 100 artillery shells at Hizballah positions in Lebanon. Writing before those events, Shmuel Rosner reflected on the series of exchanges of fire between the Jewish state and the Iran-backed guerrilla group that led up to them, as well as various attempted and successful terrorist attacks from Gaza and the West Bank:

Israel is active on five fronts: the West Bank, where violence is contained and yet the situation is volatile; Gaza, where violence threatens to erupt daily; Syria, where Iranian forces keep trying to form a base against Israel that Israel won’t allow; Lebanon, where pro-Iranian forces feel compelled to act in response to Israeli actions; and Iraq, where Israel reportedly operates as part of the war against Iranian expansion.

The situation [in Gaza] shouldn’t be confused with a lull between conflicts or cease-fires. It is . . . a low-intensity, constant war. And what is true for Gaza is truer for Iran. . . . Iran seeks to become the dominant force in the region and admits that such dominance is supposed to lead to, among other things, the destruction of Israel. Israel doesn’t want to be destroyed, so it acts to preempt Iranian attempts to gain dominance.

What made [last] week unique was the increase in the level of seriousness of the actions. For the first time, Israel was outed in such a clear way as a reported aggressor in Iraq. For the first time, Iran was ready to launch missiles from Syria toward Israeli targets. For the first time in a long while, an Israeli was killed by a hidden explosive device—a means of guerrilla warfare. For the first time since the 2006 Lebanon war, Israel is accused of launching an attack in Beirut.

This is not just intensification in numerical terms. This is intensification in qualitative terms—more and not quite the same.

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.