Alberto Nisman was found dead on Sunday, possibly murdered by Iranian operatives. Ten years ago, the Argentinian government tasked Nisman with investigating Hizballah’s 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish community center. In the course of his investigation, still ongoing at the time of his death, he discovered that the bombing had been ordered and coordinated by Iran, and he recently accused the Argentinian government of trying to suppress evidence of that fact. David Horovitz recounts Nisman’s courage:

On his first visit to Israel seven years ago, Nisman, a non-observant Jew, told me that he had been warned off the [1994 bombing] case by Iran, and that he had received death threats, including one that he found recorded on his home answering machine which was particularly troubling because his daughter was standing next to him when he played it. . . .

As I wrote at the time, Nisman did not appear particularly fazed by the threats, saying lightly that he had no plans to visit the Islamic Republic. He also swore that he would not cease his work on the case until the perpetrators and orchestrators had been tried, convicted, and jailed.

Nisman was a man determined to follow the facts, and committed to achieving justice. . . . What seems particularly tragic about the death of Alberto Nisman in Buenos Aires this week, the death of a brave, decent seeker of justice, an honest man who would not be intimidated or deterred, is that there will be nobody of comparable caliber and guts to ensure justice for him.

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.