Since her days as a law student, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has made a career of using civil litigation as a weapon against terrorists. The organization she heads, Shurat ha-Din/Israel Law Center, has brought suits in Israel, the U.S., and Canada against terrorist groups, the states that back them, and the banks that give them access to funds. Her center has won judgments amounting to over $120 million in actual payments to its clients. Now she has set her sights on Islamic State:

“The question is, How does IS get the money?” Darshan-Leitner, who is in her forties, says from her Tel Aviv office. “We can’t technically go after IS. But we can go after the Arab banks that finance them. The money source. We are not talking peanuts—we are talking about several millions of dollars a day that IS gets from oil fields. There must be banks that help IS receive that money. . . . Remember that when IS took over the oil fields, they kept the same local workers and are selling to the same people. They changed the management—they put in their own guys—but they sell to the same people, the same gas stations. They sell in Turkey and Iraq—and here’s the real irony—to Assad’s government in Syria.”

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.