The U.S. has a long history of supporting despotic regimes in the Middle East in the name of stability. They have also been surprised when supposedly stable regimes collapse almost overnight. Perhaps, argue Natan Sharansky and David Keyes, policymakers would be better served by listening to the dissidents living under these regimes:

After the Arab Spring, many of the same experts and policymakers who had insisted that the region was stable claimed that no one could have foreseen the uprisings. But this is untrue. A chorus of uniquely insightful individuals predicted exactly what would happen: the democratic dissidents who languished in prison cells in Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Egypt. Witnesses to unimaginable injustice, these men and women felt viscerally that the dictators’ days were limited. They were the soldiers on the front line of the historical drama about to unfold. The experts simply chose not to listen.

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.