In the past few weeks, the IDF has prevented three attempts by Hizballah fighters to infiltrate Israel’s norther border, shot down one of the terrorist group’s drones in Israeli airspace, and, reportedly, shelled one of its positions in Lebanon. Yesterday the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared that his forces will not rest until they have killed an Israeli soldier. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner argues that Jerusalem must not only respond with artillery and heightened border security, but also with subtler means:

Israel’s intelligence capabilities can shed light on the residential areas where the Iranian-backed Shiite terrorist group has been concealing its missiles, [thus] debunking Nasrallah’s assertion that Hizballah “has no weapons” stored in the Lebanese capital. The fact of the matter is that Hizballah has literally turned Lebanon into a powder keg, and Israeli military intelligence can pinpoint those locations, something the Lebanese people can’t do.

Hizballah was directly involved in the explosion in Beirut [earlier this month]. The 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that all but wiped out the port were stored there so Hizballah could use them in its next war with Israel. The fact that this arsenal was hidden in a civilian area and endangered the population meant nothing to Hizballah. [The group’s] senior officials know that the Israeli Air Force’s moral and ethical guidelines would make it hesitate to target missile silos nestled in residential areas.

Dissatisfaction with Hizballah in Lebanon meanwhile seems higher than ever, both because of the aforementioned explosion and because of the recent verdict convicting one of the group’s operatives in the 2005 assassination on the country’s prime minister. To Darshan-Leitner, now is the ideal time “to deal Hizballah a crippling blow” without firing a single bullet. Moreover, she writes, Israel also has:

a moral duty vis-à-vis civilians being used as human shields by living in very close proximity to chemical warehouses and missile depots. Militarily speaking, the value of the intelligence Israel holds is lower than the impact it could have on Lebanese public opinion, especially when the voices asserting that Hizballah is dooming the Lebanese people to death and destruction are growing louder.

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.