While many Druze in Israel have called on the government to aid their coreligionists in Syria, a number of prominent Syrian Druze have rejected Israeli assistance and urged continued support for the Assad regime. Mordechai Kedar explains a highly complex situation:

[B]ehind the scenes a great drama is taking place, with the added presence of Jordan and the United States, as all those involved know exactly what may be the fate of the Druze when Assad falls. . . . [Yet] the Druze are not sure Assad will indeed fall, and perhaps they still hope the Iranians will invade Syria in order to save Assad and end the rebellion against him. It also stands to reason that the [statement rejecting Israel’s help] does not represent all the Druze, some of whom certainly do not support what it says.

The Druze position is terribly complicated. They are torn between conflicting loyalties, afraid of all the protagonists in the [Syrian civil war] because they are not Muslims and because they are concentrated in three areas that can easily be surrounded and cut off. Willingness to accept aid from Israel will leave them open to the revenge of the [Assad] regime and the jihadists; refusal may leave them unprotected. They do not have a unified leadership capable of presenting a single stand, and it is hard to believe media pronouncements made by one leader or another.

The main goal of the Druze is to survive, as they have for 1,000 years in a hostile Muslim environment, but the question is how they are to go about it and what steps they should take to ensure that survival. The answers offered to those questions contradict one another, and we can only hope that the complex situation of the Druze and the division in their ranks will not lead this remarkable ethnic group to the jihadist knives and slave-markets of Islamic State.

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.