Earlier this month, Jerusalem, with Washington’s help, carried out a major cyberattack on a state-of-the-art port in the Islamic Republic, disrupting its economic activities and days of severe traffic jams. The strike was prompted by a thwarted—but potentially deadly—Iranian cyberattack on Israel’s water and sewage systems. Ron Ben-Yishai explains:

Through computers, it is possible to attack electricity grids, water facilities, hospitals, chemical plants, transportation hubs, and pipelines that transport gas and other fuels, thereby inflicting thousands more casualties and material damage than kinetic bomb damage, i.e., “regular” strikes using precise and sophisticated weaponry, intense artillery shelling, or a massive bomb attack.

[T]he Iranian attack could have paralyzed Israel’s sewage systems, disrupting the water supply for farming and aggravating sanitation problems in some areas of the country at the height of the pandemic. The potential damage to Israel by this attack could have been greater than the damage that some Iranian missiles have caused from Lebanon and Syria.

Israel decided to respond in line with the strategic policy it adopted after the Second Lebanon War in 2006. It retaliates severely and disproportionately to attacks by a group or sovereign state but stays below the threshold of a declaration of war. . . . Israel has learned the hard way that steady deterrence is the best defense, as it prevents attacks before they occur.

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.