One of the big stories to come out of the Middle East in the past decade has been the warming relations between Jerusalem and a number of Arab states, brought together by shared concerns over the growing power of Iran. But these informal, quiet alliances go back much further, explains Clive Jones:

[W]e can trace Israel’s ties to Oman back to the mid-1970s, when Israel offered and provided advice to Sultan Qaboos on border security, when he was faced with the Marxist-oriented Dhofar Rebellion. Israel provided intelligence based on its own experience of securing its borders against the PLO cross-border attacks from Jordan.

The real benchmark, [however], was the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which allowed the opening of low-level ties between Israel and many Gulf countries. Of course, these ties fell into disarray following the outbreak of the second intifada. Nonetheless, the opening of low-level ties after Oslo set a precedent for further interactions in the future, and even when some Gulf states such as Oman and Qatar [felt compelled] to suspend ties, institutional links often continued in order to maintain diplomatic dialogue.

In the longer term, these links have another dynamic: Israel has proved to the Gulf states, based on its own performance against its external threats, that it is willing to take on what is seen as Iranian aggression and aggrandizement in Lebanon and Syria, demonstrating that it is a partner in curbing Iranian military influence throughout the region. [Thus] many Gulf states who see Israel as more reliable than the Trump administration, whose unpredictability means that Gulf states cannot be sure of what the medium- to long-term U.S. policy in the Middle East and Gulf region is going to look like.

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.