Argentinian authorities are now admitting that the death of Alberto Nisman, a day before he was due to testify about the Argentinian government’s role in covering up evidence of Iranian involvement in the horrendous 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center, was not a suicide. Although there is reason to believe that Argentinian officials themselves ordered the hit, there is also reason, according to Lee Smith, to believe Iran itself arranged for his murder:

Nisman’s investigation concluded that Tehran was responsible for both the 1994 bombing and the 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29 people and wounded 242. Analysts, journalists, and Western intelligence services have long believed that Iran was behind the two bombings. However, what distinguished Nisman’s investigation was the motive he attributed to the Iranians—to punish Buenos Aires for first stalling and then canceling bilateral agreements on nuclear technology. . . .

If, in Nisman’s understanding, the purpose of the 1992 and 1994 attacks was to punish Argentina for reconsidering its bilateral relationship with Iran on its nuclear file, then killing the special prosecutor into the two bombings simply underscores that Tehran considers its nuclear program a vital interest.

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.