While the most recent Gaza war officially ended after 50 days of fighting, its second phase, which will be fought in courts and UN committees, has not yet begun. Soon a variety of NGOs and UN bodies, supported by a host of American and European law professors, will try to defame and punish Israel through legal and quasi-legal proceedings. Israel must fight back against this campaign, writes Peter Berkowitz, and it is in the interest of all who value democracy, liberty, and humanity to back it:

In theory, calling Israel to account seeks to safeguard human rights, uphold international law, and constrain the inherent brutality of war. In practice, it criminalizes Israel’s right to defend itself and abuses key principles of international law. Also, by rewarding Hamas, which commits the double war crime of militarizing urban areas in Gaza and targeting civilian populations in Israel, the lawfare aimed at Israel incentivizes terrorism and weakens the ability of the United States and the West to defend themselves.

To defend itself while also bolstering the long-term interest of other liberal democracies engaged in the struggle against transnational terrorism, Israel should undertake a preemptive strike, both in the legal arena and in the court of public opinion. The facts and the law are on Israel’s side.

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.