Earlier this month, an American federal court ruled that families of victims of terrorist attacks carried out by individuals—including the wave of stabbing and car-rammings that beset Israel in 2015 and 2016—could sue the countries that fund the groups behind the attacks. For instance, the court concluded, when a Palestinian murdered the American military veteran Taylor Force in Tel Aviv in 2016, Hamas could be held responsible—as could Syria and Iran, which support Hamas. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner explains that Israeli and American policymakers should follow the court’s lead when understanding the misleadingly named phenomenon of the lone-wolf terrorist:

[T]errorist organizations use “lone-wolf” attacks to harm Israel without assuming direct responsibility. . . . Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad use social media as a tool to instruct followers to carry out low-intensity attacks on Israeli targets, after which they only assume tacit responsibility.

These murderous acts, therefore, are anything but spontaneous; they can be predicted and perhaps even foiled in advance. A year prior to his attack, for example, the terrorist who murdered Taylor Force listened to a sermon by Sheikh Mohamad al-Arefe, a radical Islamist cleric from Saudi Arabia who preaches the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. About a month before carrying out his attack, the terrorist posted a message on his Facebook page that unmistakably implied his desire to die a shahid (martyr). Two days after his attack, Hamas proclaimed responsibility for the attack on various online platforms affiliated with the organization, calling the terrorist a shahid and a warrior.

The state of Israel must adopt the spirit behind the American court’s ruling and act accordingly. To eliminate the waves of “lone-wolf” attacks, Israel must also target the people who dispatch these terrorists, rather than just focus on direct prevention. Lone-wolf terrorists are cogs in an orchestrated [strategy], and action must also be taken against the states and organizations that support them.

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.