Yesterday marked the 25th anniversary of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) building in Buenos Aires by Hizballah, carried out in close cooperation with Iranian embassy staff, some of whom now hold high office in Tehran. Avi Weiss documents the Argentinian government’s efforts to conceal the truth about the bombing, which likely included the assassination in 2015 of Alberto Nisman, the special prosecutor investigating the case:

Carlos Menem, who was the country’s president [at the time of the bombing], did all he could to quiet the calls for justice with ever more falsehoods and denials of knowledge about who was to blame.

One year [after the attack], when I returned to Buenos Aires to . . . seek the truth and console my fellow Jews in their undying grief, I got a personal look at the cover-up. Menem’s minions tried to shut me up. And the person appointed to be a special prosecutor for the bombing, Juan José Galeano, subpoenaed me to his office, bullied me, and tried to intimidate me with thinly veiled threats if I didn’t stop looking into the matter on my own.

Nor did it end there. In 2013, another Argentine president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, tried to bury history by signing a memorandum of agreement with Iran to jointly investigate the bombing. . . . The very idea was as absurd as asking al-Qaeda to investigate the men who flew into the World Trade Center.

Menem and Kirchner are now senators in the Argentine government, a position that gives them immunity from prosecution. But who have they been protecting? Was Menem trying to cover up the role of neo-fascist and ultra-right-wing thugs he had placed in important intelligence and security positions? . . . Did Kirchner sign the memorandum of understanding with the Iranians in exchange for oil and trade? Is that why Argentina—to this day—shamefully maintains diplomatic relations with Iran?

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.