Late Monday night, a group of Israeli soldiers entered a Palestinian village to arrest terror suspects. While leaving, the soldiers were set upon by ten villagers throwing stones, one of which killed Sergeant Amit Yigal. Meir Indor, who was himself once injured in the head by a rock thrown at his car, urges the Israeli government to change its policy toward stone throwers, who are now give light sentences and protected by the IDF rules of engagement:

The current jail sentence for stone-throwing is three to seven months. If someone is injured, the terrorist will get between one year and eighteen months, if the injuries aren’t permanent. [Yigal’s] murderer could have been caught after an earlier stone-throwing, that didn’t cause damage, and would have gotten a slap on the wrist, which sends [the] message: try again until you succeed.

[Earlier] this week, youngsters threw stones and Molotov cocktails at IDF forces who came to demolish a terrorist’s home, and their jeep was burnt—without any real response. . . . Israeli soldiers can no longer be abandoned in their battle against terror. . . . Opening fire on stone-throwers must be legislated as it is in the U.S., where a stone is considered a weapon.

The U.S. has understood the devastating potential of stone-throwing and has defined it as using a lethal weapon . . . which allows for harsh sentencing and punishment.

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.