The fighting that recently erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan has its origins in the former’s occupation of a segment of the latter’s territory in a war that followed the breakup of the Soviet Union. Behind these military engagements are ethnic tensions between these two Transcaucasian peoples that stretch back at least to the 19th century—as well as complex geopolitical forces. Harold Rhode tries to make sense of the muddle of larger and smaller powers who have an interest in the current war’s outcome:

Azerbaijan, located along Iran’s northwestern border, has always been a problem for Iran. Three-quarters of the total Azeri population in the world live in northwest Iran. . . . That is why Iran [historically] feared that if an independent Azeri state were created, it might attract Iran’s Azeris to join them, and thereby dismember Iran.

The Armenian-Azeri conflict spells trouble for Israel. Israel wants no part of a conflict with Christian Armenia. But Azerbaijan is a close ally of Israel’s, because of the Iranian threat to both. Israel also supplies Azerbaijan with weapons that it hopes won’t be used against Armenia. Shiite Iran supports Armenia, largely . . . because Iran sees [Shiite] Azerbaijan as an existential threat to its own territorial integrity. Turkey and Israel oddly find themselves on the same side in this conflict, with both supporting Azerbaijan.

Some observers have asked whether Iran might have provoked the Armenians to attack the Azeris. If so, did Iran do so to distract/preoccupy America and its allies from turning up the heat against Iran even more severely? [And] will Iranian Azeris—so passionately Iranian, yet still Azeri—remain silent as Armenians kill their fellow Azeris across the border?

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.