While America began providing funds to the Jewish state in order to bolster a cold-war ally, the benefits to the American economy and the American people of doing so have only increased since the fall of the Soviet Union. This is not only because Jerusalem spends most of the military-aid money it receives on U.S.-manufactured hardware, writes Frank Musmar:

Israeli businesses invest heavily in the U.S. economy, with Israel placing among the top-twenty suppliers of direct investment in the U.S. More than $150 billion was invested by Israeli companies in the U.S. between 2010 and 2015.

Strategically, the U.S. and Israel have developed deep . . . ties to confront common threats. This . . . relationship is a crucial pillar of America’s Middle East security framework, and the partnership is continually growing and expanding into new areas, [drawing] in part upon Israel’s capabilities in designing advanced military, homeland-security, counterterrorism, and cyber-protection technologies that help the U.S. meet its growing security challenges.

Israel is the place where U.S. special-operations units trained before deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Israeli armor-plating technology protects U.S. soldiers. Israel is a cost-effective, battle-tested laboratory for U.S. defense industries, and it provides the U.S. with more intelligence than all the NATO countries put together. American battle tactics are formulated according to the Israeli playbook. . . . It is [also], in effect, the largest U.S. aircraft carrier, yet it does not require a single American boot on the ground.

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.