Israel’s firm and vocal opposition to the nuclear deal with Iran, and its concern over Iran’s ascent as a regional power, have aligned it with Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). In fact, writes Simon Henderson, Israeli ties with the Gulf states date back to the 1970s; however, those ties are kept strictly sub rosa, and only go so far:

[L]inks are extensive, even, in some cases, very good. But they are mostly out of the public gaze. So although shared anxiety about Iran’s nuclear program and Tehran’s mischievous intent has been a bonding factor, Jerusalem must have been disappointed by the response of the GCC—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman—to this summer’s diplomacy. When the deal was announced in Vienna on July 14, only Israel opposed it. The six Arab countries, although some expressed apparent concern about the details, voiced support for the Obama administration’s solution. They might have been in the same book as Israel but they pointedly did not want to be, at least publicly, on the same page. It was yet another reminder to Jerusalem of the limitations of any links.

The links, [however], are both diplomatic and economic. The political contacts almost certainly go up and down—it’s hard to imagine that the Mossad’s assassination of the Hamas gun-runner Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai in 2010 was just a minor hiccup. But the business and trade links are growing steadily and, at least in the case of some countries (and I don’t mean Egypt and Jordan, with which Israel has official relations), are significant.

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.