Beijing and Tehran are reportedly on the cusp of concluding a massive agreement that would involve military cooperation and $400 billion of Chinese investment in the Iranian economy over the next 25 years. While Israel has for some time enjoyed growing and beneficial economic relations with China, Jacob Nagel and Mark Dubowitz contend that these do not offset the dangers of the world’s second-most powerful country siding with Israel’s most dangerous enemy:

For Israel, this is a clear sign that it is time to pivot from Beijing. . . . The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is also the most dangerous adversary of the United States—Israel’s most valuable ally. The Chinese Communists are serial proliferators of nuclear and missile technology to rogue regimes like Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan. They threaten Hong Kong and Taiwan. They are militarizing the South China Sea, weaponizing data, stealing intellectual property on a massive scale and committing shocking human-rights abuses, including forcing more than one million Uighur Muslims into concentration camps.

But for Israel, decoupling won’t be simple. China is one of Israel’s largest trading partners and sources of foreign investment, alongside the United States and Europe. . . . Beijing sees Israeli critical infrastructure as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (a trillion-dollar global land, sea, and communications program spanning more than 100 countries). This includes the Haifa port (where the U.S. Sixth Fleet docks), the port of Ashdod, underground tunnels and control systems in the northern Carmel mountains, and Tel Aviv’s subway system. The strategic importance of this infrastructure is clear, given that some of it runs alongside key military installations, major businesses, food suppliers, and other essential Israeli military and civilian services.

Israeli strategic planners may be tempted by the idea that China-Israel economic ties could offset Beijing’s growing partnership with Tehran. That is a delusion. The CCP will acquire everything it can from both Israel and Iran without fear or favor. And, if forced to choose, it will choose the Islamic Republic. Iran provides critical energy supplies to China that Israel cannot match. Its population is eight times larger. Its land mass is 75 times greater. It occupies a much more strategic territory for the Belt and Road. And the Islamic Republic is an American enemy, which Beijing can leverage in its global contest with the U.S.

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.