In the past two years, Kurdish militias known as Peshmerga have proved to be the most successful local forces fighting Islamic State. They have also offered refuge to, and earned the loyalty of, a number of persecuted religious minority groups—such as the Kakei and Yazidis (local sects with relatively small populations) and Assyrian Christians. In addition, writes Seth Frantzman, the Kurds and their allies display a strong affinity with Israel:

There is a general sense among the various minority groups in [the region of] Kurdistan that their war against jihadists is similar to what is happening in Israel. There is a great deal of respect for Israel’s fight against Islamist terror, and recognition that what was once done to the Jews has now been visited upon the Kurds and other minorities. In the 1980s, when Saddam Hussein was planning attacks on Israel, he was also committing the Anfal massacres against the Kurds, in which 4,000 villages were damaged and up to 180,000 people murdered. Saddam used the same poison gas on Kurds with which he threatened to “burn Israel” in 1991.

The commander of a Peshmerga unit, when asked which country he feels the Kurds are closest to, [cites] Israel. “We think Israel is our closest friend in the struggle,” he says. “We have a common history.” . . .

Indeed, for decades, Arab nationalists, Islamists, and the Iranian regime have described the Kurdish struggle in terms of Israel. On July 21, for example, the former Iranian foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, was reported to have claimed that the U.S. was “plotting to establish a second Israel in the region” in the form of a free Kurdistan.

Opposition to racism and genocide, and the feeling that both Iran’s mullahs and extremists in the Arab world have targeted them as a “second Israel,” have cemented a unique Kurdish bond with the Jewish state, and with the idea of preserving the kind of regional diversity that Israel represents.

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.