To safeguard its interests, protect its allies, and prevent a resurgence of Islamic State, the United States must contain the Islamic Republic’s expansionism, and to do so, argues Reuel Marc Gerecht, Washington must focus its attention on Syria. In the words of the former commander of Iranian forces in Syria, the country as “the key region” to Iranian strategy, where Tehran’s “interests can most be hurt.” But if the U.S. refuses to take action, it will leave Israel alone to stand up to the ayatollahs:

[T]o ensure that the clerical regime cannot exploit Iraq’s highway system to move soldiers and materiel, including medium-range missiles, easily into the Levant, Syria is the choke point; . . . if Tehran can develop medium-range missile bases and permanently deploy a significant ground force in Syria, all protected by advanced Russian air-defense systems, then it may be able to check Israel’s capacity to play a Middle Eastern cop, which is the role the Obama and Trump administrations have defaulted onto the Jewish state as Washington has thinned its objectives and responsibilities in the region.

With Trump’s decision not to respond militarily to Iranian attacks against shipping in the Persian Gulf and a critical Saudi oil facility, the president has seriously undermined the fear that others have had of American power. If Washington is unwilling to risk war to thwart the clerical regime’s ambitions, then the only real hard-power check on Tehran is Jerusalem.

And surrounded by ever-better missiles in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, Israel naturally would hesitate to strike the Islamic Republic. Even with the Iron Dome anti-missile shield, civilian casualties might be staggering, . . . And the possibility of an Israeli military check against the ongoing Iranian nuclear-weapons quest will diminish appreciably. The Israelis might still make an effort to take out the clerical regime’s primary nuclear facilities, given Jerusalem’s existential fear of an Iranian nuke, but the Islamic Republic would have an increasing advantage: the more ballistic and cruise missiles Tehran can deploy, the more tempting it becomes for any Israeli cabinet to just live with a doctrine of mutually assured destruction.

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.