With its economy battered, “inconsistent and illogical” lockdown rules, and lack of coordination at the highest levels of the government, Israel can’t be said to have avoided mistakes in its handling of the pandemic. While adding much else to this list of complaints, and acknowledging that much yet remains to be seen, David Horovitz finds that there is much more to praise:

As of this writing, Israel, population 9.2 million people, has suffered 219 fatalities in the coronavirus pandemic. Of the nearly 16,000 confirmed cases, more than half have now recovered. Fewer than 100 Israelis are currently on ventilators. Compare those figures to other countries.

By [one estimate], Israel has 25 fatalities per million citizens—which puts it at about 50th in the world, and better than the global average. With many countries providing less reliable statistics, furthermore, Israel’s global ranking is actually almost certainly considerably better. By no means peerless, but striking nonetheless.

Israel’s relative success, as reflected in [the] comparative statistics, . . . is prompting growing calls for Israel to reverse the norm by which Diaspora Jewry rushes to help it at times of emergency, and to reach out urgently with effective assistance to a Diaspora in pandemic crisis.

[T]hose numbers above underline that, turning 72 in these nightmare circumstances, Israel has at least wary cause for encouragement. They were not always perfectly executed, but the decisions Israel’s leaders and authorities made, and that its citizens generally heeded, were designed to maximize the defense against a mysterious virus that disproportionately targeted the elderly—our parents, our pioneers. For now, the numbers and the comparisons suggest, that strategy has been remarkably effective.

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.