On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an unprecedent direct flight from Tel Aviv to Khartoum, amid speculation that Sudan would be the next Arab country to make peace with Israel. While the Sudanese government then clarified that nothing of the sort was to happen, its statement on the matter left the possibility open in a way that until recently would have been unimaginable. Benny Avni sees Pompeo’s visit, and even the rumors about peace, as evidence that Sudan, having freed itself of the genocidal dictator Omar al-Bashir, is ready to reconcile with the West:

[Sudan’s] premier, Abdalla Hamdok, said that the current government has no authority to make peace with Israel before an election. Yet [his country’s] location on the shores of the Red Sea would certainly make it a strategic ally for Israel and America.

Sudan, meanwhile, is desperate for foreign aid and Western investment. To start getting that, it needs to be off the State Department’s terror list, where it was placed in 1993 for harboring top terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. Several America-based terror-related lawsuits against Sudan remain pending, while others have been resolved.

Delisting with respect to terrorism goes beyond technicalities. It’s a political issue with wider implication than ties with Israel. As everywhere else in the world, China’s influence in the Middle East is growing. Unless America competes in this new cold war-like struggle, countries like Sudan will fall under Beijing’s spell.

Washington [should try] to make Sudan, once a cruel terrorist state, into an American ally. Delisting and relations with Israel can mark the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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.