Last week, the chief of staff of the Iranian military traveled to Ankara, where he met with his Turkish counterparts and apparently arrived at a strategic agreement, to be finalized during a reciprocal visit to Tehran. Turkey also announced recently that a delegation of senior Russian officials will soon be arriving to discuss cooperation among all three countries. According to reports in the Iranian press, writes Amir Taheri, this would involve working together to repress Kurdish national aspirations in the area that includes part of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. And that’s just the beginning:

[Turkey wants] to promote a regional alliance that could eventually include Iran, Russia, and Iraq. The idea is that such an alliance, though limited in scope, would leave little space for the U.S.-led Western powers and their regional Arab allies to regain the influence they had enjoyed in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman empire over a century ago.

That, in turn, would give Turkey a big voice in the Levant as a springboard for a greater projection of power across the Middle East. . . .

[Likewise], Tehran believes the future of Syria must be determined by Iran, Turkey, and Russia to the exclusion of the U.S. and its Arab allies, [not to mention Israel]. . . . Don’t be surprised if Iran presents the new informal alliance as Russia and Turkey joining “The Resistance Front” led from Tehran. . . .

Is an Iran-Turkey-Russia triangle really taking shape? To judge by noises made in Tehran, Ankara, and Moscow, the answer must be yes. However, the three remain strange bedfellows, with contradictory positions and conflicting interests. In other words, between the cup and the lip there may be many a slip.

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.