As the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Qassem Suleimani has for many years directed both Tehran’s own soldiers and its network of local militias throughout the Middle East. Michael Doran analyzes his blood-soaked career and the significance of his death at the hands of the American military:

Suleimani built Lebanese Hizballah into the powerful state within a state that we know today. A terrorist organization receiving its funds, arms, and marching orders from Tehran, Hizballah has a missile arsenal larger than that of most countries in the region. The group’s success has been astounding, helping to cement Iran’s influence not just in Lebanon but farther around the Arab world.

Building up on this successful experience, Suleimani spent the last decade replicating the Hizballah model in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, propping up local militias with precision weapons and tactical know-how. In Syria, his forces have allied with Russia to rescue the regime of Bashar al-Assad, a project that, in practice, has meant driving over 10 million people from their homes and killing well over half a million.

In Iraq . . . Suleimani’s militias ride roughshod over the legitimate state institutions. They rose to power, of course, after participating in an insurgency, of which he was the architect, against American and coalition forces. Hundreds of American soldiers lost their lives to the weapons that the Quds Force provided to its Iraqi proxies.

His departure will make Iran much weaker. It will embolden the country’s regional rivals—primarily Israel and Saudi Arabia—to pursue their strategic interests more resolutely. It will also instill in the protesters in Iran, Lebanon, and, especially, Iraq, the hope that they will one day wrest control of their governments from the talons of the Islamic Republic.

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.