With its neighbor Yemen enmeshed in a bloody civil war that has drawn in other nearby countries, with the regional troublemaker Iran situated just across the narrow Gulf of Oman, and with another neighbor, Saudi Arabia, facing a host of problems, the gulf nation has remained, in Daniel Pipes’s words, “an oasis of calm.” There have been no terror attacks, and not a single Omani has joined Islamic State. Pipes tries to explain this “most surprising country in the Middle East”:

Islam has three main branches: Sunni (about 90 percent of all Muslims), Shiite (about 9 percent), and Ibadi (about 0.2 percent). Oman has the only Ibadi-majority population in the world. Being a tiny minority in the larger Muslim context, rulers of Oman historically kept away from Middle Eastern issues. Part of the country was isolated mountainous desert terrain, part was focused on the seas, especially on India and on East Africa. . . . This unique remoteness from Middle Eastern problems, whether it be the Arab-Israeli conflict or Iranian expansionism, remains in place. . . .

A benevolent dictator, [Oman’s ruler] Sultan Qaboos bin Said dominates the country in ways alien to a Westerner. He serves simultaneously as prime minister and as minister of defense, foreign affairs, and finance, as well as supreme commander of the armed forces and police. . . . The Arab insurgency that began in 2011 reached Oman but, as in the case of most of the monarchies, was easily handled with some extra spending. . . .

As a democrat, I rue absolute monarchies. As a Middle East analyst, however, I acknowledge that monarchies govern far better than the region’s alternatives, mainly ideologues and military officers.

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.