In recent months, Tehran’s forces and proxy armies in Syria have crossed the country’s eastern border to link up with their counterparts in Iraq. More recently, the former Iranian presidential candidate Ibrahim Raisi has been seen on the Lebanese border with Israel, accompanied by Iranian and Hizballah officers. Elliott Abrams comments:

Raisi . . . is a member of the Assembly of Experts that will choose a successor to the “supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei and is a candidate for that position himself. Visiting Beirut, he took time to talk with the head of Hizballah and to pay his respects at the home of the late terrorist mastermind Imad Mughniyeh. . . .

[This] visit delivers several messages. First, borders have no meaning for Iran; the Islamic Republic is determined to be the dominant player in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Second, the governments of those countries have no control of their own borders and territory; Iranian military and terrorist leaders can come and go as they please. Third, whether Lebanon gets into a conflict with Israel will be determined by decisions made in Tehran, not in Beirut.

That is a sad development for most Lebanese, who are not fanatical Hizballah supporters. But it is one the United States should keep in mind as we assess our relations with Lebanon and our military aid to that country.

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.