On Friday, the island kingdom of Bahrain announced that it is joining the United Arab Emirates in normalizing its relations with Israel. Representatives of all three countries meet in Washington today to finalize the arrangement. Although Manama has historically had less hostile relations with Jerusalem than other Persian Gulf nations, the move is no less momentous, as Oded Granot explains:

Bahrain, a tiny island nation off the Saudi coast, is more susceptible than the UAE to national-security threats posed by Iran. Tehran has made territorial claims on Bahrain in the past, and the fact that over 70 percent of Bahrain’s slightly more than one million residents are Shiite, ruled by a Sunni minority, makes it easier for [the Islamic Republic] to try establishing terrorist cells inside the country to destabilize the regime.

There’s a great deal of importance to the public alliance between Bahrain and Israel, and not just because of its security implications. Bahrain is a very small country, but has a free-market economy that doesn’t rely solely on oil. The Bahraini economy is the fastest growing in the Arab world and opens up a plethora of opportunities for broad commercial ties between the countries. On social issues, too, such as women’s rights, Bahrain is ahead of many Arab countries. In the cultural realm, meanwhile, more books are published there than any other Arab country.

How ironic that as these Gulf states normalize relations with Israel and emphasize equality between the religions, the Palestinian Authority is signaling it will not allow Muslims who enter Israel through Ben-Gurion International Airport to pray at al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. The tables have turned: Israel, which has regularly been accused of infringing on freedom of worship on the Temple Mount, is opening its gates to all Muslim worshippers who arrive from the Gulf—while the PA is threatening to forbid them from praying there.

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.