Israel’s Druze citizens have petitioned the government to extend military and humanitarian aid to their brethren in Syria who are increasingly unable to rely on the weakened Assad regime for protection against Islamic State. Caroline Glick sees an opportunity for Israel:

[I]n the humanitarian realm, Israel can set up refugee camps on the Syrian side of the border. It can arm the Druze villagers. It can protect them from the air. As for the nearly three-quarters-of-a-million Druze at Jebl Druze, [the Druze heartland in Syria], . . . they wish to defend and govern themselves in an autonomous region for the foreseeable future.

But to fend for themselves, they need weapons. Without arms, with the regime’s collapse seemingly imminent, it is possible that the Druze will be unable to survive. It is also possible that if Israel doesn’t provide them with weapons, someone else—perhaps Hizballah—will arm them and so buy their loyalty. . . .

If the government decides to act along these lines, it doesn’t mean that it will be in a position to start making long-term strategic plans that rely on Druze support. . . . [But by] helping them [Israel] can signal to others—for instance, the Kurds—that it can be trusted. . . . Given our own Druze community, our moral duty and national interest in ensuring their survival is self-evident.

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.