Two weeks ago, Iraqi forces took Kirkuk—one of the major cities of the Kurdish Regional Government—aided by a variety of local militias. Jonathan Spyer draws a disturbing historical parallel:

The capture of Kirkuk recalls other swift and decisive assertions of control that the Middle East has witnessed in recent years. Perhaps the closest parallel might be the Hizballah takeover of west Beirut in May-June 2008. Then, too, a pro-Western element (the March 14 movement) sought to assert its sovereignty and independent decision-making capabilities. It had many friends in the West who overestimated its strength and capacity to resist pressure. And in the Lebanese case as well, a sudden, forceful move by an Iranian client swiftly (and, it seems, permanently) reset the balance of power, demonstrating to the pro-Western element that it was subordinate and that further resistance would be fruitless.

There is, of course, a further reason to note the similarity between Kirkuk in October 2017 and Beirut in 2008. Namely that in both cases, the faction that drove its point home through the judicious use of political maneuvering and the sudden application of force was a client of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). In Lebanon, the client was Hizballah, the prototype of the IRGC-sponsored political-military organizations that Iran is now using to exert its influence across a huge swath of the Middle East. In Iraq, the equivalent force is the PMU (Popular Mobilization Units) or Hashd al-Shaabi. These fighters spearheaded the entry into Kirkuk, working in close coordination with the Iraqi army’s 9th Armored Division, the Emergency Response Unit of the federal police, and the U.S.-trained counterterrorism service.

The Shiite militias of the PMU were raised in June 2014, following a fatwa from the renowned Iraqi Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. At that time, Islamic State was heading for Baghdad, hence the need for the rapid mobilization of auxiliary fighters. The PMU’s forces now consist of about 120,000 fighters in total. And while dozens of militias are associated with it, a handful of larger formations form its central pillars. The three most important groups are all pro-Iranian and directly connected to the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). . . . The leaders of all three are closely linked to the [IRGC’s] General Qassem Suleimani. They are, as one diplomat put it, “Iran’s proconsuls” in Iraq.

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.