In 1997, an Argentinian lawyer named Alberto Nisman was asked to take the leading role in prosecuting fifteen policemen who stood accused of carrying out the deadly bombing of the AMIA Jewish Center in Buenos Aires three years prior. Nisman soon realized that the officers were being framed, and began investigating the case anew—an investigation which led him to uncover Iran’s responsibility for the bombing, and a conspiracy by the Argentine government to obscure it. While his death in 2015—just before he was supposed to testify about his findings to the Argentinian legislature—was initially ruled a suicide, it soon became clear that he was murdered. Gustavo D. Perednik explains Tehran’s role in the cover-up, and in Nisman’s death:

The plot to cover up Iran’s responsibility for the AMIA bombing began on Saturday, January 13, 2007, when the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called on his Venezuelan counterpart, Hugo Chávez, at the Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas. The two leaders claimed to be the vanguard of an anti-imperialistic war against the United States and regarded each other as close allies. . . . Chávez not only became the junior partner in an alliance with the Iranians but also drew other countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, and Nicaragua into the Iranian orbit. . . .

Apparently, during [a] secret meeting with Chávez, Ahmadinejad expressed his concern with the imminent Interpol convention in France, where Nisman, the Argentinian representative, planned to restate his demand that Interpol monitor the Iranians [suspected of having helped plan and carry out the AMIA bombing]. Ahmadinejad probably offered Chávez a substantial sum of money, as Venezuela purchased (with Iranian money) six-billion dollars of the Argentinian debt by the end of 2008. . . .

In October of 2010, . . . [Chávez] finally persuaded [Argentina’s President Cristina Kirchner] to accept the benefits for both of their countries of making an agreement with Iran. Three months later, Foreign Minister Hector Timerman signed a secret agreement [with Iran] in Aleppo. Further impetus for this subterfuge derived from the Obama administration’s [insistence] that Iran was no longer an enemy and from the [promise] that the Iranian government would pour endless resources into Argentina.

Kirchner and Timerman were not averse to contacting Mohsen Rabbani, the mastermind of the AMIA terror attack. Moreover, they assured Iran that the withdrawal of Interpol red alerts against Iranian terrorists would follow the signing of an open agreement. The plan was to set up a fictitious “Commission of Truth” with judges from both Iran and Argentina. . . . The commission was given the task of shedding light upon the terror attack and its motives, despite the fact that the secret treaty of 2011 had designated a different role for the “Commission of Truth”: . . . to bury the case by spreading false information and fomenting confusion. . . . The legal brief [prepared by] Alberto Nisman on January 14, 2015 provides extensively the details of this project and discloses the real purpose of the commission.

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.