Six months ago, an Israeli backpacker named Naama Issachar—en route home from India— was arrested during a layover in Moscow for possession of a small amount of marijuana. Last week, a Russian court sentenced her to seven-and-a-half years in prison despite pleas from the Israeli president and prime minister. Ruthie Blum comments:

The assumption in Jerusalem is that Issachar’s detention and disproportionate punishment, even by Russian standards, constitute a form of leverage on the Israeli government to deny extradition to the United States of the Russian credit-card cyber-criminal Alexei Borkov, who was arrested during a trip to Israel in 2015 as a result of an Interpol alert. For the past four years, Borkov has been in an Israeli jail awaiting an Israeli Supreme Court decision on the legality of extradition in his case. The affirmative decision finally handed down appears to have coincided with Issachar’s arrest.

What Moscow wants is for Israel to “extradite” Borkov to Russia—reportedly a euphemism for having the hacker back home where Putin can put him to proper use in underhanded dark-web endeavors. . . .

In response to the incident, the Israeli immigration minister Ze’ev Elkin warned travelers to avoid Russia. But Blum suggests the story has an additional moral:

Issachar [claims] that she had forgotten to clean out her suitcase before leaving India, which is why the small amount of weed remained at the bottom of her bag. . . . Herein lies a crucial point about Israeli sojourners in general and Issachar in particular. Cannabis possession is illegal in many places in the world, including in India, where she had been purchasing and smoking it. That she wasn’t caught was merely due to luck.

As well-traveled as they are, Israeli millennials like Issachar are so conditioned by the freedoms they enjoy at home—and so enamored of cultures other than their own—that they frequently miscalculate the consequences of their actions abroad.

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.