As some observers predicted, the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran has encouraged Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates to seek their own civilian nuclear programs. Jonathan Schanzer and Henry Sokolski contend that these programs are only a pretext for the development of technology that can be used for manufacturing nuclear arms:

[N]either Iran nor Saudi Arabia needs nuclear power. Nor, for that matter, does any other state in the gas-soaked, sun-drenched Middle East, where civil nuclear programs are simply nuclear-bomb starter kits. Instead of straining to control these programs, or even facilitating them, the U.S. should encourage less risky, cheaper, clean non-nuclear alternatives. . . .

[The] efforts to build nuclear plants in Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as in Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, and Algeria, are dangerously misguided. When Washington encourages such pursuits, it accelerates an implicit arms race, even if the U.S. insists on additional safety measures. Whatever Riyadh has, Tehran will demand as part of the “better” nuclear deal the Trump administration wants someday to negotiate. Conversely, any concession made to Iran will become Riyadh’s next demand. Ditto, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, etc. What they’re buying is not an efficient source of energy; it’s an emergency option to build nuclear weapons.

To break this arms race, America should lead. First, it should stop bargaining over dangerous nuclear projects in the region, urge Riyadh to drop its nuclear plans, and press Tehran and other nuclear-supplier states to do the same.

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.