Last week, an Argentine judge indicted his country’s former president, Cristina Kirchner, for her role in obstructing an investigation into Iran’s responsibility for the deadly bombing of a Jewish center over two decades ago. Now the country’s senate must determine whether to remove her presidential immunity so that a trial can take place. Mark Dubowitz and Toby Dershowitz explain what’s at stake:

From 2004 until 2015 . . . the [Argentinian] prosecutor Alberto Nisman tirelessly pursued the truth behind this crime. He knew from his investigation that the attack was an Iranian-planned operation. And he determined that President Kirchner was behind a cover-up designed to whitewash Iran’s role.

What drove Kirchner? Argentina faced deep economic problems at the time, and the financial benefits of closer relations with Iran might have tempted her. Her government also had populist ties to Iran and the Bolivarian bloc of nations led by Venezuela. . . .

When the federal judge Claudio Bonadio handed down the 491-page indictment against the former president, her foreign minister Hector Timerman, her handpicked intelligence chief, her top legal adviser, two pro-Iran activists, and ten others, he didn’t mince words. He called the attack on the Jewish community center an “act of war” by Iran and accused Kirchner of covering up the role of senior Iranian leaders and their Hizballah proxies in exchange for a trade deal. . . .

Three years ago, Nisman was set to testify to the country’s congress on Kirchner’s role in the cover-up. The day before his testimony . . . he was found dead in his apartment in Buenos Aires, with a bullet in his head. This, despite the fact that he had a ten-man security detail paid to protect him. . . . In a normal democracy, investigating the murder of a man like Alberto Nisman would be a top priority. But Kirchner and her allies assured that justice . . . was stymied for years.

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.