Syrian opposition leaders asked John Kerry last September why America wouldn’t support them in fighting Iranian proxies like Hizballah. The secretary of state bluntly replied that “Hizballah is not plotting against us.” This statement, difficult to believe at the time, has been proved decisively false by the recent arrest of two highly trained Hizballah agents—both naturalized U.S. citizens. Marc C. Johnson writes:

It seems clear now that Kerry’s principal motivation in attempting to steer the opposition away from any confrontation with Iran’s terrorist proxies was fear of angering the regime in Tehran. Kerry was at pains to avoid jeopardizing the Obama administration’s already fragile nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, which Barack Obama and his team desperately wanted to hold up as a key, legacy-burnishing foreign-policy achievement. But Kerry’s off-the-cuff comment betrayed either a shocking ignorance or cynical indifference. . . .

Hizballah, it should be noted, is the most advanced terrorist organization operating today. It long ago became a de-facto state within the country of Lebanon [and] has both a functional military wing and fairly sophisticated intelligence and counterintelligence capabilities. The members of this latter branch . . . operate just like many moderately advanced sovereign intelligence and security services the world over. They identify, train, recruit, and dispatch spies for all the usual reasons that nation-states do so. But their spies have the added mandate of preparing for and executing terrorist attacks.

For every [Hizballah operative] that is caught and prosecuted, there are others still lurking in the shadows. And these are no mere “sleeper cells”; they are active, planning, and preparing for eventual operations against and even within the United States. Dangerous as Islamic State and al-Qaeda may be, they have achieved nowhere near this level of sophistication in terms of planning, training, or spycraft. Arrests such as these are a sobering reminder that, contrary to what John Kerry may believe, Hizballah continues to plot against us, both here and abroad.

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.