Since the Islamic Republic’s creation, the destruction of Israel has been a key part of official propaganda, actuated in, among other things, extensive support for terrorist groups that attack the Jewish state. Michael Segall, examining numerous public sources on the issue, notes that Tehran’s attitudes are unlikely to change as a result of the nuclear deal or indeed any time soon:

Sixteen years after his death, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s founding vision—that the eradication of Zionism is an inevitable precondition for redeeming contemporary Islam—continues to guide the current generation of Iran’s religious, political, and military establishment. To him the destruction of Zionism was an axiom never to be questioned or strayed from and an objective to be perpetually and actively pursued. According to this vision, Israel should be fought as part of a protracted global struggle between Islam and the West, which “intentionally planted the Zionist entity in the heart of the Islamic world.” . . . [T]he current supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, . . . is the chief agitator for the extermination of Israel, spreading this message worldwide over social media [and] books, and addressing various target audiences in English, Arabic, and Farsi.

The Iranian religious, political, intellectual, and military elite support and repeat Khamenei’s messages. Members of the Iranian army high command . . . have even declared their willingness and capability to destroy Israel, once the leader’s order is given. Practically speaking, the regime’s intelligence and international subversion agencies, mostly the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, massively support anti-Israel terror groups, and stage repeated conferences in Iran dedicated to denial of the Holocaust and to the delegitimization of Israel’s right to exist. . . .

Iranian leaders. . . have not moderated their anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric, even during the critical stages of the nuclear talks with the West, as if the nuclear talks were completely dissociated from Iranian foreign policy. Moreover, Iran went so far as to argue that the talks do not indicate any Iranian-American rapprochement. Accepting Iran as a nuclear-threshold state capable of launching a military nuclear program . . . will allow it to intensify its direct anti-Israel aggression and its subversive activity against moderate Arab states . . . under a nuclear umbrella.

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.