Among the many flaws of the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran were the expiration dates placed on various provisions. On October of next year, the deal dictates, the conventional-arms embargo—imposed on Tehran by the UN over a decade ago—will be lifted. Eli Lake, calling this clause “one of the worst mistakes” made in the negotiations, points to its dangers:

The concession wasn’t to Iran so much as to China and Russia, two great-power rivals that participated in the nuclear negotiations. In the 1990s, China and Russia sold Iran a variety of weapons systems, which the Iranians then reverse-engineered. By this time next year, America’s two most potent geopolitical rivals will have a green light to sell advanced missiles to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

It would be bad enough if Iran kept those weapons for itself. But if past is prelude, there is a good chance Iran’s numerous proxies in the Middle East will benefit as well.

Last week, in little-noticed testimony before the Senate Foreign-Relations Committee, the U.S. special representative for Iran, Brian Hook, shared information from newly declassified U.S. intelligence assessments. Since mid-2017, he said, Iran has “expanded its ballistic-missile activities to partners across the region.” That includes Hizballah, Palestinian terrorist groups and, as of mid-2018, Shiite militias in Iraq.

Taken together, this information underscores not only the need to extend the United Nations arms embargo, but also the limits of the current U.S. strategy of “maximum pressure.” While crippling sanctions on Iran have made it much harder for groups such as Hizballah and Shiite militias to pay salaries, they have not put a dent in Iran’s broader quest to arm those proxies with weapons capable of hitting U.S. allies.

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.