Last Sunday, the Islamic Republic celebrated the 39th anniversary of the attack on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the seizure of its staff. To honor the date, the government painted American and Israeli flags at the entrances of public buildings, so that those walking in or out could trample on them. But many refused to do so, writes Benny Avni:

Iranians now increasingly dismiss the notion that the sole cause of their problems is the Great Satan. . . . Masih Alinejad—the Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based author of The Wind in My Hair, a best-seller about the battle she inspired against Iranian laws mandating traditional Islamic head coverings for women—[reports that] her Iranian social-media followers . . . sent her several video clips showing students going out of their way to sidestep the flags. Posted on her Instagram account and narrated in Farsi, one video received a million hits. . . .

“This is a new phenomenon,” she says. “Everyone I talk to is worried about the economic impact of the sanctions,” and yet “people are refusing to buy into the regime’s talking points.” . . .

Poverty-stricken remote villagers, taxi and truck drivers, environmentalists, women’s-rights supporters, even upscale, traditionally regime-supporting merchants at the Tehran bazaar all now chant against their theocratic rulers. They [complain of] corruption, mismanagement, involvement in foreign wars, and oppression at home rather than faulting Israel or America.

Sure, some will continue to scapegoat America. But for the many Iranians disenchanted with the regime, [U.S.] sanctions can reinforce a reality: the Islamic Republic’s revolutionary ideology is quickly taking them to nowhere. And they realize another truth, too: their real oppressors aren’t Israel or America—but the clerical regime.

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.