Reflecting on the subdued Independence Day that the Jewish state celebrated on Wednesday, as most coronavirus-related lockdown regulations remained in effect, Ruthie Blum stresses that the nation has much to be proud of. And those things go beyond “the Star of David on our flag or the international acclaim received by our start-ups.”

One peculiar side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic [has been] a spike in the desire of Israelis living abroad to return home, and an increase in the interest of Diaspora Jews in undertaking aliyah. According to [its] chairman Isaac Herzog, . . . the Jewish Agency has been receiving thousands of inquiries from Israelis, and hundreds from British, French, and American Jews.

Two families who arrived this month—a couple from France and the Israeli parents of American-born children returning after a fourteen-year stint in New York—[stated] that a major factor in the timing of their move was Israel’s handling of the pandemic. Both [couples] said they felt far safer in Israel, from a health standpoint, than in the U.S. and Europe. . . . The French wife stated that Israel, unlike her country of origin, does not have a shortage of surgical masks.

Two young Israeli men studying in Italy who came rushing back when the crisis struck expressed the same sentiment. One told [reporters] that he used to take Israel for granted, but when he witnessed Italian hospital staff refusing to provide ventilators to any patient over the age of sixty, he had an awakening. “Even if Israel ran out of equipment, it would find a way to acquire the machines before letting anyone die,” he said.

It’s a great lesson for all the Israelis who have been whining . . . about the country’s “disastrous” healthcare system in general and the health ministry’s “poor management” of the COVID-19 crisis in particular. Sadly, it’s a message most of us won’t hear, especially not now, when the decreasing number of patients on ventilators has enabled us to focus the brunt of our anxiety on the decimated economy.

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.