This week, Benjamin Netanyahu has been visiting Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, and Ethiopia. Many factors have encouraged the warming of relations between Israel and these African states. They include the fall of Muammar Ghaddafi, who exerted his influence to keep Israel out of Africa, the thaw between Israel and those Sunni Arab states that have African allies, and interest in Israeli water technology. But, writes Herb Keinon, one concern is paramount:

Three of the four [countries visited by Netanyahu]—Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia—are facing terrorism from Islamic extremists, and Rwanda is concerned about a spillover effect. These countries are afraid that what has happened in Libya, Mali, and the Ivory Coast could happen to them as well.

For this reason they are interested in forging stronger ties with Israel. It is not all about getting water, energy, and agricultural know-how; it is also very much about getting Israeli knowledge and assistance in how to combat terrorism.

These countries, and other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, are more concerned with questions of homeland security than they were some twenty years ago, and they see Israel as one country with a great deal of experience—and technology—in this field.

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.