In April, the Syrian government enacted Law Number 10, which determines how the regime will prioritize the reconstruction of the country’s war-torn areas. One of the law’s clauses will make it very difficult for internal refugees—those displaced elsewhere in the country due to the fighting—to reclaim real property they abandoned. Ibrahim Abu Ahmad argues that there is something more sinister in this law than mere red tape or even avarice:

Government actions [such as this] appear designed to tip the balance of power among the country’s different ethnic groups in Bashar al-Assad’s favor by blocking Sunni refugees’ returns to certain strategic areas of Assad-controlled territories. If Sunnis, [long the majority religious group in Syria], become less than 50 percent of the population, other minorities could create an effective majority that will be able to stand against Sunni Syrian interests. Indeed, if Assad, [who, along with much of his ruling clique, is not Sunni but Alawite], were to succeed in creating a Syria where Sunnis are no longer a majority of the population, he may be able to place increasing pressure on a group that already has a tense relationship with Syria’s minorities, and is now in addition blamed by Assad’s supporters for the war [itself]. . . .

[T]he ambiguity in the law’s wording has raised speculation that this legislation is part of a government initiative to gain control over vast swaths of personal property by enabling the state to become the final determinant of which civilians will reside where in postwar Syria. Many Syrians fear that the government intends to redistribute the properties of its Sunni citizens to Assad supporters and non-Syrian Shiite proxies, providing residences for Shiite forces and their families and thus making permanent their presence in the country. . . .

Assad is trying to secure strategic areas in Syria by creating a majority-non-Sunni population there, which will enable him to tighten his control over Syria with less cost and more efficiency. This will also serve the interests of Iran, which would like to form a Shiite corridor from Tehran to Beirut.

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.