In January, when a new Egyptian ambassador arrived in Israel after a three-year hiatus, observers hailed the event as a sign of warming relations between the two countries, which have been cooperating to contain Hamas and fight Islamic State infiltration in the Sinai Peninsula. Yet in Egypt itself, a parliamentarian who recently met with Israel’s ambassador faced widespread condemnation in state-owned media and was then expelled by his colleagues. Eyal Zisser attempts to make sense of these mixed messages:

[T]he improved diplomatic and security relationship between the countries still has not trickled down to the street. . . . [However, it] is hard to gauge the extent to which hostility [to Israel and Jews], which Egypt’s intellectual elite also expresses on occasion, truly represents the mood of the average Egyptian. . . .

It doesn’t take too much intelligence to realize that [Egyptian] lawmakers don’t represent much of anyone in Egypt, and it is doubtful whether they even care about the conflict with Israel. What’s interesting in this story is that an Egyptian parliamentarian dared do what many of his colleagues perhaps wished they could, were they not afraid of the backlash from fellow lawmakers.

The bottom line, however, is that both countries’ leaderships have a common view of the challenges that lie ahead. In retrospect, perhaps the understandings shared by the respective political and security echelons are more significant than the ephemeral mood on the street or among segments of the cultural and intellectual elite in the Arab world.

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.