Last December, after years of negotiations with private companies and arguments with opponents in the Knesset, Benjamin Netanyahu managed to conclude a deal to begin the exploitation of the natural-gas fields beneath Israel’s coastal waters. On Sunday, the deal was struck down by Israel’s supreme court. Jonathan Tobin warns of the possible consequences:

The bounty from the Tamar field, which has already begun producing natural gas, and the far bigger Leviathan site, on which development has not yet begun, had the potential to make Israel the world’s next energy superpower. [It held the] prospect of not only energy independence but also of a large export business that would [both] enrich the Jewish state [and] enable [the creation of] economic alliances . . . that would make it far more secure.

The only worry about all this was not whether the gas could be brought out or whether it would play a part in transforming Israel’s economy. [It] was whether Israel’s fractious political system and overregulated economy, and a judiciary and bureaucracy that seem most comfortable when stifling innovation and growth rather than enabling it, would find a way to gum up the works and stop the gas fields from being exploited. Unfortunately, we now have the answer to that question. . . .

[A] high court that recognizes no limits on its power to intervene wherever it likes without a shred of authority that is actually rooted in law . . . could doom Leviathan and expectations about Israel’s energy future.

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.