In December, a Lebanese journalist was able to interview two Hizballah fighters held captive by Nusra Front, a Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda. David Daoud explains what this interview reveals about Hizballah’s influence in Lebanon and its current war in Syria:

Hizballah . . . runs its own private educational system [in Lebanon], which graduates some 2,000 competitive and well-trained university students a year. Though mixed with the party’s ideology, the education these schools provide far exceeds anything offered by the state and even rivals the country’s prestigious Christian missionary schools. . . . [Furthermore, Hizballah] helps needy families with tuition—a luxury not available to them in other Lebanese school systems.

The indoctrination [found in these schools and other] institutions constructs children’s identity so that their moral compass is based on the ideology of . . . “guardianship of the jurist” [i.e., a belief in the absolute religious and political authority of Iran’s supreme leader] that governs political life in Iran, Hizballah’s main backer. And even if these institutions do not transform young Shiites into adult party ideologues, they make them more amenable to Hizballah’s pressures by force-feeding them the notion that they have no alternative to the party. . . .

Once . . . inexperienced fighters [like the two captives] are in Syria, . . . they are often handed to the Iranians. In Syria . . . the Iranians “are running the show,” giving deployment and battle orders to Hizballah fighters, who are thrown together with other Shiite foreign fighters including Iraqis and Afghans.

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.