Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, recently published an entire book calling for the destruction of Israel. Ofra Bengio argues that its release was timed to celebrate the nuclear deal, “Iran’s victory over the ‘Great Satan,’ the United States, and more specifically the ‘Little Satan,’ Israel.” Bengio places this in the context of the millennia-old history of Persian-Jewish relations, with its many ups and downs:

Among all Muslim sects, the treatment of Jews was the worst under Shiite rule, especially in Iran, the only place where Shiism has been the religion of the state since the 16th century and where Shiites came to represent 93 percent of the population. In Shiite Iran the Jews were persecuted and had to wear a special badge on their clothing to distinguish them from the Muslims. There were also occasions of massacres of Jews or forcible conversion to Islam. . . .

While, [before the 1979 Islamic revolution], the government of the Shah nourished the peripheral alliance with Israel, the [current] clerical regime is nourishing new dreams of its destruction. . . . [A]s long as the clergy rules Iran, the prospects for its accepting the legitimacy of Israel are dim.

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.