Since 2011, Yemen has been in a state of civil war between the Houthis—a tribal, religious, and political group—and the country’s officially recognized government; the conflict became more severe after the Houthis seized the capital in 2014, and Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states intervened to support the government. By this time, it had become clear that the Houthis were receiving massive support from Iran. Julie Lenarz writes:

The Houthis, officially called Ansar Allah, are a homegrown organization that originated in northern Yemen in the 1990s and has fought against Yemen’s governments on and off since 2004. . . . [In the past few years, the] Houthis adopted a strident anti-Western rhetoric that originated in Iran and is frequently [employed] by [Tehran’s] Lebanese terror proxy Hizballah. “God is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory to Islam!,” [their official slogan], can be found scrawled on mosques and other public institutions across Houthi-controlled territory. . . .

Before the Houthi rebels entered the capital Sana’a in 2014, Iran started to support the insurgency with weapons, money, and training. . . . [T]he Quds Force, a special-forces unit of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, . . . had a few hundred military personnel in Yemen to train Houthi fighters. . . . [I]n return, about 100 Houthi members had traveled to Iran for training at a Revolutionary Guards base near the city of Qom. . . .

[The Houthis’] television channel, al-Masirah, is broadcast from Beirut with the assistance of Hizballah, which holds enormous influence over the city’s southern suburbs. [There are also] striking tactical similarities between the Houthi takeover of Sana’a and the events in Beirut in 2008, when Hizballah gunmen seized control of large parts of Lebanon’s capital. . . .

Yemen is the latest project in Iran’s grand plan of ascendancy in the region for which they use the Houthi rebels as a vehicle of projecting power on the Arabian Peninsula. Hizballah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, recently threatened that the next war with Israel could see . . . “thousands, even hundreds of thousands of fighters [come] from all over the Arab and Islamic world to participate—from Iraq, Yemen, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.”

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.