On Monday, Tehran announced that its stockpile of low-enriched uranium has exceeded the 300kg limit imposed on it by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the 2015 nuclear deal is formally known. Arguing that the move is intended to pressure Europe into helping the ayatollahs circumvent U.S. sanctions, Emily Landau urges European governments not to give in:

In contrast to those who say that current tensions with Iran are rooted in the fact that the United States exited the nuclear deal last year, the reality is that the problems are grounded in the flawed provisions of the JCPOA itself. . . . Indeed, Iran’s very ability to use uranium enrichment to provoke [the West] is a direct result of one of the major flaws in the JCPOA. . . . [R]ather than strengthening the message that uranium enrichment is unacceptable for a state with a record of lying and cheating in the nuclear realm, the deal unwisely granted legitimacy to Iran’s uranium-enrichment program. And so today Iran can turn up enrichment—by increasing either its stockpile or the level of enrichment—at will.

So far, the Europeans have not reacted strongly to Iran’s crossing of the uranium-enrichment threshold and are treating the current violation as a minor infraction. For the Europeans to continue to attempt to relieve pressure on Iran by circumventing U.S. sanctions would be a grave mistake at this point, and counterproductive to the strategy that the United States is pursuing: maximum pressure on Iran so that it will come back to the table for a better deal. And no strategy has a better chance of achieving that goal than pressure. . . .

Iran cannot be allowed to hold international actors hostage, and to be the one calling the shots. . . . If the Europeans need a reminder about the nature of the Islamic Republic, then they got it [on Tuesday] when the Iranians announced that they can destroy Israel in a half-hour if attacked by the United States. A regime that makes such threats must be tightly held in check, and it certainly cannot be allowed to cross the nuclear threshold.

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.