Last month, the Pentagon announced its withdrawal of Patriot missiles from Saudi Arabia, where they had been positioned in 2019 following a series of Iranian rocket and drone attacks. In nearby Iraq, Tehran has directed over 40 rocket attacks at American targets—which do not have adequate anti-missile systems—over the last twelve months. John Hannah and Jacob Nagel argue that the U.S. should look to Israel for the technology that will defend American servicemen against the Islamic Republic’s arsenal:

[U]ntil very recently, the only real option available to U.S. personnel in Iraq who received warning of incoming missiles or rockets was to take cover and pray that their positions did not suffer a direct hit. Unfortunately, even the deployment of Patriots is, at best, a partial solution to the Iranian threat.

A better short-term solution would ideally supplement Patriots with a mixture of two existing Israeli air-defense systems. The first and most urgently needed is Iron Dome, developed by the Israeli company Rafael, and now co-produced with the American defense firm Raytheon. . . . Iron Dome’s interception rate is close to 90 percent, making it by an order of magnitude the most battle-tested and successful missile-defense system in the world.

The second Israeli technology that the U.S. should give serious consideration to is the Skyceptor missile from Rafael and Raytheon. Based on the Stunner interceptor developed for Israel’s David’s Sling missile-defense system, Skyceptor can be fired from Patriots and was specifically designed to intercept not only ballistic missiles but also low altitude, maneuverable cruise missiles and drones, [both of which have been used repeatedly by Iran].

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.