Despite its allegedly immense power, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) failed to influence the president’s pursuit of the Iran deal, and also appears unable to rally sufficient opposition to it in Congress. By contrast, the much less well known National Iranian American Council (NIAC) has played an important behind-the-scenes role in orchestrating and campaigning for the deal. Lee Smith explains:

[NIAC’s founder Trita] Parsi deserves lots of credit for his victory, but he can’t cash his checks too publicly—because the American public doesn’t like Iran. Which in turn points up a major difference between the pro-Israel lobby and the pro-Iran lobby—both of which . . . make entirely legitimate use of the American democratic system to advocate for their respective points of view. Where NIAC differs from AIPAC is in its relation to American public opinion. . . . The pro-Iran lobby, [unlike the pro-Israel lobby], has no real base of popular support in America. . . .

One of the chief ironies of the ongoing debate over the Iran deal is that both defenders and detractors of a supposedly all-powerful “Israel lobby” have been wasting their breath over an entity that has notably failed to affect U.S. policy on a single issue of major concern over the entire course of Barack Obama’s six-year presidency—a record of unmitigated failure that would clearly condemn it to the black hole of Beltway irrelevance if not for the bizarre imaginative hold, and political utility, of the myth of a powerful conspiracy of Jews who secretly rule the planet.

Or perhaps it’s not an irony at all. Some of the loudest detractors of the “Israel lobby” are in fact paid staffers and partisans of the Iran lobby—an entity that, unlike the Israel lobby, has succeeded in radically altering U.S. foreign policy, with the help of the president and his advisers. Seen from a certain angle, the Iran lobby has pulled off the neat trick of using the specter of the Israel lobby to shift U.S. policy away from Israel and toward Iran—while actually succeeding at the same dark arts that it blames the Jews for employing. The Iran lobby used a combination of lobbying, donations, propaganda, and back-door personal connections to top policy-makers to . . . alter American foreign policy and align the United States with an oppressive authoritarian regime that is destabilizing the Middle East.

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.