Last month, Chevron—one of the world’s seven largest fossil-fuel companies—acquired Noble Energy, the Texas-based corporation that owns a large share of the rights to the capacious gas reserves located beneath Israel’s coastal waters. Oded Eran examines the implications:

Chevron’s entry into Israel bears a number of political aspects. Chevron has extensive operations in Arab and Muslim countries, [a fact that] has indirect significance regarding the efforts of countries and bodies around the world to boycott Israel. The involvement of an American company on the scale of Chevron will endow Israel with reinforced political status in the East Mediterranean Gas Forum, which also includes Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy.

The entry into the region of an economic giant such as Chevron also conveys an important economic message, beyond the safety net with which it provides the natural-gas sector in Israel. Indirectly, it constitutes additional recognition of the economic stability of the Israeli economy and its prevailing legal and administrative norms.

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.