It’s one thing if critics of Israel don’t want American taxpayers to fund Israel’s offensive capabilities. That’s a wrongheaded view, since America has a powerful moral and strategic interest in an Israel that can defend itself by all means necessary. It’s also self-defeating, since Israel could build or acquire most of the weapons it needs without American strings attached.

Still, at least that’s an argument animated by coherent moral considerations. Iron Dome, however, has zero offensive applications: It identifies rockets that are likely to hit vulnerable targets, most of them civilian, and, with an astonishingly high success rate, takes the rockets out. The system also very likely saves Palestinian lives by vastly reducing the political pressure on Israeli leaders to rapidly eliminate Hamas’s vast rocket arsenal by ordering a ground invasion.

In other words, barring some libertarian-style objection to any kind of foreign aid (which was never the issue here), support for Iron Dome should be a no-brainer — all the more so since the system is now being deployed by the United States to protect American troops. There is no conceivable argument that denying funding puts pressure on Israel to show greater military restraint (quite the opposite) or helps advance the cause of a two-state solution. It is not about giving peace a chance. The only coherent rationale is to give Hamas a better chance — to kill Israelis in the next war.