Since regular munitions can kill just as effectively as chemical weapons, it is unlikely that deterring Bashar al-Assad from deploying the latter—as the airstrikes last month and the previous year were intended to do—will save many lives. For precisely this reason, argues Max Singer, preventing their use is a worthy and achievable goal:

It is possible to get the world to enforce moral values when it can do so without incurring large costs. In places like Syria, the world cannot stop the killing without a military force stronger than the local forces, and no country is willing to sacrifice its soldiers [to do so]. But the world can [enforce] the ban on chemical weapons by using only missile attacks from a distance.

There is no way the recent U.S.-British-French attack on Assad’s chemical-weapons facilities could have a major influence on the struggle for control of Syria or stop the killing of civilians. The purpose of the attack was . . . to make sure Assad and his successors understand that he loses more from his use of chemical weapons than he gains—which is certainly true.

The dictators of the world don’t use chemical weapons because they are cruel; they use them because they are a slightly easier and cheaper way to kill and frighten their enemies. But they have other ways of killing and frightening people. So if the example of what happened to Assad convinces them that they would lose more from international retaliation for using chemical weapons than they might gain from their use, they will not use them. Others might decide it is a mistake to build or buy such weapons in the first place. . . .

A world in which chemical weapons are not used is better than a world in which they are—even if there is only a small reduction in the number of people killed. Perhaps a world in which international agreements achieve some moral goals, even modest ones, is better than a world in which nations cannot succeed in enforcing any moral values at all.

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.