On May 12, an IDF unit entered a Palestinian village to arrest four terrorists; as they were leaving, locals began dropping bricks and cinder blocks on them from rooftops. One of them, Nizmi Abu Bakr, took careful aim and hit a young soldier, Ami Ben-Yigal, squarely on the head, killing him.

Abu Bakr has since then been apprehended and faces jailtime. But the Israeli high court, responding to a petition from a self-styled human-rights group, has barred the IDF from demolishing his home. Contrary to what the court’s ruling claims, such demolitions—which the IDF has employed as a counterterror measure for many years—are not primitive acts of revenge, as Ruthie Blum writes:

Encouraging violence against Israelis in schoolbooks and the media, the Palestinian Authority (PA) completes the circle by paying hefty stipends to terrorists and their families. Abu Bakr’s wife and children have undoubtedly begun to collect their salary for his slaying of Ben-Yigal. In addition, if they are patient, they have good cause to hope that one day in the not-so-distant future Abu Bakr will be released from jail in a “prisoner-swap” deal.

This presents a deterrence problem that Israel only has been able to reduce—certainly not to solve—through home demolitions. Just as the PA invites and incites terrorism by rewarding the families of terrorists, Israel curbs it somewhat by holding those families accountable in a manner that causes would-be perpetrators to think twice before embarking on missions that might have a negative effect on their parents, spouses, and/or children. Abu Bakr is no exception.

That left-wing activists consider this extremely mild form of deterrence—culled from assessments of the culture in which the Palestinians are submerged—a cruel form of “collective punishment” is par for the course. But the Supreme Court is not supposed to base its rulings on the political biases of its judges. Sadly, however, many of these consider it not only their job to overturn government moves that they oppose, but their moral imperative to do so.

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.