In the past days, rumors have circulated about the imminent demise of Iran’s Supreme Leader. Whether true or not, the Assembly of Experts, the council responsible for appointing Khamenei’s successor, convened this week to elect a new chairman. Might a new head of state lead Iran in a different direction? Ali Alfoneh thinks not:

Mohammad Yazdi, a hardline ayatollah and former judiciary chief, was elected chairman of Iran’s Assembly of Experts. . . . Yazdi is also among the leading candidates to replace Ali Khamenei. . . . Should he succeed, Yazdi is likely to continue the example of his predecessor by expanding the role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps in Iran’s foreign and security policies. . . .

[It is also possible that] Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder, may emerge as the surprise frontrunner in the so-called pragmatic camp of former president Hashemi] Rafsanjani and current president Hassan Rouhani. Rafsanjani and the young Khomeini may genuinely try to liberalize Iran’s economy and continue Rouhani’s attempts at bringing the country out of isolation, but are not likely to have a security policy much different from that of the current supreme leader.

It is difficult to prophesy the outcome of Iran’s current power struggle, but given the likely candidates to lead the country, one scenario may be safely ruled out: that Khamenei’s eventual demise will usher in a moderate Islamic Republic at peace with the world.

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.