Over the past month, stories have appeared in the press about retired Israeli security officials expressing support for the Iranian nuclear deal. Now there are claims that an IDF intelligence assessment, not yet released to the public, also defends the agreement. The claims, writes Martin Kramer, are “politicized nonsense”:

Not everyone with a pension and an opinion is equal. Most of the people who argue that Israel should not fight the agreement still think it’s a bad one; they simply believe there is no point in provoking President Obama when the deal will inevitably be approved and implemented. This argument is not the same as supporting the deal—it is resigned acquiescence. . . . .

But what about [the] claim of “game-changing” assessments issued by current intelligence officials? . . . [T]he intelligence assessment is that Iran won’t be able to build a bomb under the terms of the agreement. (That is, if Iran doesn’t cheat—the assessment says the mechanisms for inspection are flawed.) Iran might even show short-term restraint in terms of its support of terrorism to consolidate its gains from sanctions relief. But the estimate also holds that when the agreement expires, Iran will be only weeks away from a nuclear breakout.

In the meantime, Iran will have gained undeserved legitimacy from the deal. . . . The bottom line of the assessment, as reported in the press, is that the risks of the deal outweigh the opportunities. [T]he “eruption of dissent” [from Netanyahu’s position] is imaginary.

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.