If the U.S. signs an agreement with Iran, argues Max Boot, the damage done will be irreversible, even by a Republican president disposed to “tear up the treaty”:

Iran, as its leaders have made clear, is expecting an immediate payoff from signing the [nuclear] accords—a payoff that President Obama has vowed to deliver. If leaks are accurate, the President is offering Iran a $50 billion “signing bonus” by offering to unfreeze a large portion of the Iranian oil funds held overseas. . . . While President Obama cannot formally repeal all U.S. sanctions without legislative action, he can suspend most of them, and our allies will eagerly follow suit.

President Obama assures us that if Iran is caught cheating, the sanctions will “snap back,” but it’s impossible to imagine this president ever admitting that his signature achievement—a nuclear accord with Iran—has unraveled. [And even if a subsequent president were to] decide to put all of the U.S. sanctions back into place, . . . Iran could then sprint ahead with a nuclear breakout and lay the blame on the U.S. in the court of international public opinion. In any case, the next president would not be able to reapply the multilateral sanctions that have been the most important element in applying pressure to Iran. . . .

The U.S. would then get the worst of both worlds: Iran already would have been enriched by hundreds of billions of dollars of sanctions relief—and it would be well on its way to fielding nuclear weapons with de-facto permission from the international community. . . .

That makes it all the more imperative to stop a bad agreement now—not two years from now.

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.