Born to upper-middle-class Marxist parents in the Islamic Republic, Shay Khatiri learned at school that America was the Great Satan and at home that it was “just as much a dictatorship as Iran,” and that both regimes were equally repressive. But Israel was a country toward which he had no negative feelings:

I never minded Israel. What I didn’t like was the Palestinians’ receiving aid from Iran while Iranians were starving. I had never met a Jewish person, but the regime hated Jews, so I grew to love them out of spite for the regime.

As for America, Khatiri’s attitudes diverged from his parents’ after the September 11 attacks, when he heard George W. Bush speak of bringing greater freedom to the Middle East. If the U.S. wanted democracy in the Muslim world, and the ayatollahs opposed it, Khatiri knew he sided with Washington. He eventually emigrated to Hungary—where he befriended a number of Israelis—and then to America. After explaining his political evolution, he suggests what his adopted country might to encourage the anti-regime sentiments in his homeland:

Democratization must come from within, . . . but it can’t always happen without foreign help. After several attempts by the Iranian people, it is now clear that the regime is too powerful for the people [to overthrow on their own]. We can begin with supporting labor unions and dissidents who are trying to make change happen from the inside.

In their correspondence, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson called the United States an “empire of liberty.” . . . Thomas Paine [likewise] said that the cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind. America possesses many powers, but its power as a cause is the cheapest to spend and yet the most valuable, and has the greatest impact. This is something many of my friends and fellow students [in the U.S.] find bewildering. If only they could visit 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.