For the past several weeks, the Jewish state has been among the countries taking the strictest measures to protect against the spread of CORVID-19. Coordinating this response is Moshe Bar Siman-Tov, the director general of the health ministry, who—unlike all of his predecessors—is not a physician but an economist who cut his teeth working for the finance ministry. Haviv Rettig Gur assesses Bar Siman-Tov’s performance thus far:

Israel’s early and vigorous response to the coronavirus outbreak was deemed extreme by many observers. It raised the hackles of Beijing, Seoul, and Rome as their nationals were suddenly, and sometimes without warning, turned back at the airport. Israel did more to limit travel from more countries, and did it faster, than any other nation on earth. By early March, as the scale of the threat grew and governments in Italy and the U.S. were coming under criticism for doing too little, some of the anger at Bar Siman-Tov’s quarantines and air-travel restrictions lessened.

“Barsi,” [as Bar Siman-Tov is known to friends and colleagues], led an aggressive effort to slow the virus’s penetration into Israel—not because he thought he could stop it, but because slowing its spread would prevent overtaxing Israel’s hospitals and health infrastructures. The thinking was sound, health experts said. Israel has only so many respirators and lung specialists, making the death toll from the virus a function not of the number of people who fall ill but of the rate at which they do fall ill.

Slowing the spread could mean the difference between a few hundred dead by the end of the crisis and many thousands or even more who might succumb because hospitals could not treat them properly, and ventilators were in short supply.

Yet there is a price to such caution, even if it is one worth paying:

Several industries that depend on international travel and large gatherings of people—hotels, tour companies, private bus companies, event halls, airlines, conference organizing, caterers—are being devastated by the sudden disappearance of most of their business for the immediately foreseeable future. . . . [T]he virus, and Israel’s response to it, has already disrupted the country’s access to global supply chains, as a significant proportion of imports [would have] arrived in Israel on the now-canceled passenger flights. Suddenly lumber yards can’t get new lumber. Even many tech companies are now firing engineers because they can no longer acquire components for their products from 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.