In the past two years, European intelligence services have on many occasions—often with the assistance of the Mossad—foiled attempts at espionage, assassinations, and terror attacks by Iranian agents. But the timid responses of European officialdom, and the unwillingness to confront Tehran over these activities, argues Yossi Mansharof, are part and parcel of the desire to preserve the 2015 nuclear deal:

The result of the European Union’s attachment to the nuclear deal is appeasement of Iran. As part of this appeasement, the EU confines itself to statements against Iran’s missile program and expansionism in the region. The EU has also made its peace with the political and security settlement prevailing in Lebanon, which gives Hizballah effective control of the country. . . .

The EU also responded weakly to the arrest in Iran of dual European-Iranian citizens on various pretexts, including espionage. . . .The weakness of the EU’s policy on Iran was also demonstrated by its feeble response to the arrest of 7,000 Iranian demonstrators in 2018, 26 of whom were executed. . .

The EU’s fidelity to the nuclear deal and its appeasement of the Iranian regime’s aggression both inside and outside Iran have encouraged the Islamic Republic to escalate its terrorism on the European continent. The Iranian terrorist campaign in Europe, which has been mostly unsuccessful up until now, has encompassed many countries. . . . [For example], the German authorities discovered a cell of ten Iranian spies in December 2017 conducting surveillance of Israeli and Jewish targets. These targets included the Israeli embassy in Berlin and kindergartens and other centers of the local Jewish community. In November 2017, a German court convicted Mustufa Haider Syed-Naqfi, a Pakistani citizen living in Germany, of spying for Iran. [Syed-Naqfi] had been tailing Reinhold Robbe, the head of the German-Israeli Association. . . .

European diplomats [have] explained that the EU [has] refrained from strong criticism of Iran because of its wish to strengthen Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, whom they perceive to be a moderate in Iranian politics. This policy facilitates EU efforts to preserve the nuclear agreement with Iran and avoid anything that might help President Trump. Faced with the EU’s [consideration of] sanctions on Iran in response to revelations of growing Iranian subversion throughout Europe, however, Rouhani himself implicitly threatened in December 2018 to carry out terrorist attacks in Europe.

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.