In recent decades, collaboration between Washington and Jerusalem in the realm of military technology and cybersecurity has led to major breakthroughs that have benefited both, such as the David’s Sling and Iron Dome anti-missile systems. Jacob Nagel and John Hannah encourage the U.S. to look to Israeli medical and public-health ingenuity in addressing the current pandemic:

It should not have been a surprise when, near the start of the crisis, on March 8, Vice-President Mike Pence, head of the U.S. coronavirus task force, and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed in a phone call “to advance technological and scientific cooperation” to combat the deadly virus.

In a country of only 9 million people, more than 1,400 companies operate in the medical-innovation sector, developing transformative technologies to detect and to treat an array of serious illnesses, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, and Parkinson’s. These private-sector actors are part of an extraordinarily rich biotech ecosystem that is supported by the government and also encompasses world-class academic institutions and medical centers with a proven track record of rapidly bringing life-saving breakthroughs to market.

Like the United States and other countries around the world, Israel has mobilized its entire society to combat COVID-19 and mitigate its impact. While biotech companies, academic institutions, and medical researchers are naturally on the front lines of the effort to forge technological solutions, they have also been joined by the Israel Defense Forces, the Ministry of Defense’s Directorate of Defense Research and Development, and Israel’s legacy defense firms. . . . [T]hese organizations have now taken on a major role in fighting the virus, drawing on their enormous pool of skilled manpower and creatively repurposing existing military technologies to support out-of-the-box solutions.

Leveraging Israeli innovation to bolster America’s own efforts to combat COVID-19 should be a priority for the Trump administration.

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.