Can Iran’s leaders be trusted to put their economic self-interest ahead of their hatred for the U.S. and Israel? This is a point of contention between supporters and opponents of the pending nuclear deal. Yet even if the Islamic Republic is guided solely by rational self-interest—as President Obama has repeatedly claimed—it is unlikely, argues Michael Oren, to keep up its end of any bargain:

Even now, without a deal in place, it seems obvious that the sanctions will start to unravel. Consequently, the ayatollahs sensibly have determined that, by dragging out the negotiations, they can wrest further concessions from the United States. They can keep more centrifuges, more facilities, and a larger uranium stockpile.

Why, logically, would Iran believe Obama’s claim that “all options are on the table”? On the contrary, Iran has remained the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism—brazenly threatening America’s allies in the Middle East . . . without facing military or even diplomatic retribution from the United States.

The Iranians have taken note of how the White House helped overthrow Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi after he gave up his nuclear program but shied away from North Korea when it tested more weapons. Iran can see how Bashar al-Assad, by ceding part of his chemical arsenal, went from being America’s problem to America’s solution, and then to barrel-bombing his countrymen with impunity. Iranian rulers understood they could count on obtaining their nuclear program’s objectives of regime survival and regional supremacy without dismantling a centrifuge.

Obama’s argument not only fails logic’s test but also history’s. Anti-Semitism, the president [claims], “doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat [or] being strategic about how you stay in power.” Except, in one infamous example, it did. The Nazis pursued insane ends. Even during the last days of World War II, as the Allied armies liberated Europe, they diverted precious military resources to massacring Jews.

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.